Contents

1. Misconceptions1
2. Controversy Between H. P. Blavatsky and Abbé Roca26
3. Notes on Abbé Roca’s “Esotericism of Christian Dogma”27
4. Esotericism of Christian Dogma by Abbé Roca39
5. Reply To Madame Blavatsky58
6. Reply to the Mistaken Conceptions of the Abbé Roca73
7. Reply of the Abbé Roca. . . . with copious footnotes by H.P.B.97
8. Alchemy In The Nineteenth Century123
9. Modern Idealism Worse than Materialism154
10. The Five-Pointed Star160
11. Love With an Object165
12. What Is Theosophy?171
13. Erroneous Ideas Concerning Doctrines of Theosophists175

MISCONCEPTIONS

REPLY TO THE ARTICLE “RÉVOLUTION,” BY ALEPH¹,

IN THE Revue du Mouvement Social²

[Le Lotus, Paris, Vol. I, No. 6, September, 1887, pp. 321-338]

[Translation of the French text is from Blavatsky: Collected Works, vol viii, p. 70–91]

A

France, why do you misunderstand us?

European and American Journalists, why don’t you study genuine Theosophy before criticizing it?

Because scientific aristocracy is full of vanity and struts on stilts of its own fabrication; because modern philosophy is materialistic to the roots of its hair; because both, in their pride, forget that in order to understand and to appreciate the evolution of the future it is necessary to know the evolution of the past, should one consider everything that is not understood by this scientific aristocracy and this materialistic philosophy to be “intellectual derangement and mere jugglery”?

B

It is precisely because of these “thinkers who experience at the present time an indefinable discomfort,” when observing the crumbling of all truths, that the “missionaries from the Himâlayas” offer their knowledge and their light. A very feeble light, but one whose rays, proceeding as they do from the Sun of Truth, are worth more in any case than the artificial lights offered by physiologists and pathologists, suddenly elevated to the ranks of psychologists. Can it seriously be believed that to fathom the mystery of the origin and essence of the human soul, it is sufficient to paralyze certain regions of the brain and to excite certain others? In order to kindle a ray of hope which their tired eyes can hardly distinguish from the grimacing Chinese Shadows, manipulated by pseudo-scientists who tell the public: “Here is Science!”—we display the “symbolic Lotus” before these thinkers, the malcontents of life.

The article entitled “Révolution” is a false conception of Theosophy—whether that of Madras, or London, or Paris, or America. It is an alphabetical complaint and a series of errors, from capital A to capital Z. Errors, I say, concerning the Theosophical missions and teachings, but an admirable summary of today’s situation, as regards Science, the aspirations of the masses, and the

observations concerning the state of social affairs. To sum up, “Révolution” is a syllogism, whose premises are false, but whose logical conclusion is a credit to “Aleph.” Truly, his only fault has been to judge the mission of the Madras Theosophists by the caricatures of the journalists of all countries. He has accepted this portrait on faith and from it draws his conclusions. This is an anti-theosophical procedure: Theosophists must not accept anything on faith; they leave that manner of acting to the anthropomorphic religions and to the blind worshippers of materialistic science.

C

The “missionaries” of Le Lotus are ready to answer. Some of them have entered the laboratories of the chemists and have helped the latter to produce the phenomenon of astral sounds. Others have proved to physicists that when one knows how to awaken the latent principle, all matter is animated. One famous chemist was afraid to let his colleagues know of the phenomenon that he himself had produced. Physicists understood nothing of it. Challenged to explain what they had seen, they answered: “Matter, as we know it, cannot act in that way. Not believing in the devil, we are forced to consider this a trick. The Theosophists are skilful jugglers.” DIXIT!

So be it! The “Theosophical missionaries “are now singing:

“Since the laurels have already been cut,
We won’t go to the woods any more.”

The scientists have kept them all to themselves; they deny ancient occult science its due. The Theosophists-Occultists are well-behaved children; they do not fight for their portion, but cheerfully add the

thistles that grow by the wayside, to the laurel crowns the scientists weave for themselves.

We make no claims for any one religion. The supernatural does not exist in Nature, which is One, Absolute, and Infinite. We have never pretended that a miracle was a simple matter to us—a miracle being as impossible as a phenomenon, due to combinations as yet unknown to science, becomes possible as soon as it can be produced at will. We even say that every “manifestation with physical effects” (Spiritist vocabulary), whose nature escapes the perspicacity of natural sciences, is PSYCHOLOGICAL JUGGLERY. (Nota bene. Do not confuse this jugglery with that of Robert Houdin, please.)

D

The truth of our doctrines rests on their philosophy and on facts of nature. To accuse us of claiming that our occult science surpasses that of Jesus or of Buddha is to slander us.

E

European Theosophists have very little to do with “asceticism.” It is a hereditary disease of the Hatha-Yogis, the Hindû prototypes of the Christians who whip themselves and mortify their flesh until they become idiots and converse with the Devil without converting him. The Theosophists, even in India, protest against the Yogism of the fakirs. A solitary ascetic is a symbol of the most cowardly egotism; a hermit who flees from his brothers instead of helping them to carry the burden of life, to work for others, and to put their shoulders to the wheel of social life, is a coward who hides himself when the battle is on, and goes to sleep drunk on an opiate.

Asceticism, as understood by exoteric religions, has produced the ignorant fools who throw themselves under the chariot of Juggernaut. If these unfortunate people had studied the esoteric philosophy, they would know that under the dead letter of the dogma taught by the Brâhmanas—exploiters, like all priests, inheritors of the possessions of their victims, who are driven to madness by superstitious terrors—is hidden a profoundly philosophical meaning; they would know that their bodies which they crush under the wheels of the chariot of Jagan-nâtha (Juggernaut in popular dialect—meaning Lord of the World or Anima mundi) are the symbols of the gross material passions which this “chariot” (the divine and spiritual soul) must crush. Knowing this they would not apply the moral and spiritual asceticism taught by esotericism to their bodies—the mere outer animal husk of the god which is latent within. The Theosophists of India labor to destroy exoteric asceticism, or the “deification of suffering,” veritable Satanism of superstition. As to our Genesis, “Aleph” knows not the first word.

F

Pre-historic annals, preserved by the Masters of Wisdom, on the other side of the Himâlayas, contain the account not of the “Creation,” but of the periodic evolution of the Universe, its elucidation and its philosophic raison d’être. The absence of the modern telescope proves nothing.³ The ancients had something

³ It is common knowledge that in the vicinity of Mexico City, a bas-relief has been discovered on a pyramid older than the discovery of America, which represents a man looking at the stars through a long tube, very similar to our telescope. Not to mention the astronomical observations of the Sûrya-Siddhânta which can be mathematically traced to some 50,000 years ago. — Editor of Le Lotus.

better than that. Moreover, one has but to read the Traité de l’astronomie indienne et orientale, by J. S. Bailly, to find therein proof that the ancient Hindûs knew as much as, and much more than, our modern astronomers.

Universal Esotericism preserved by certain cosmopolitan fraternities, and the key to which has long since been lost by the Brâhmanas in general, presents a cosmic and human genesis which is logical and based on natural sciences, as well as on a pure transcendental philosophy. Judeo-Christian exotericism gives but an allegory based on the same esoteric truth, but so smothered under the dead letter that it is taken for mere fiction. Jewish Kabbalists understand it to some extent. Christians having appropriated to themselves the possession of others could not possibly expect to be enlightened regarding the truth by those whom they had despoiled; they preferred to believe in the fable and to make of it a dogma. This is why the Genesis of the ancient Hindûs can be scientifically demonstrated, while the Biblical Genesis cannot. There is no “Brâhmo-Buddhist” paradise, nor is there a Brâhmo-Buddhism; the two harmonize with each other as much as fire does with water. The esoteric basis is common to them both; but while the Brâhmanas buried their scientific treasures and disguised the beautiful statue of Truth with the hideous idols of exotericism, the Buddhists—following in the footsteps of their great master Gautama, the “light of Asia”—labored for centuries bringing the beautiful statue out in the open again. If the field of exoteric and official Buddhism of the Churches of both North and South, those of Tibet and Ceylon, is covered once more with parasitic weeds, it is precisely the Theosophists who are helping the high priest Sumangala to extirpate them.

G

None of the great religions, neither the Ethiopian nor any other, has preceded the religion of the first Vedists: ancient “Budhism.” Let us explain. When one speaks of esoteric Budhism (with one d) to the European public—so ignorant of oriental matters—it is mistaken for Buddhism, the religion of Gautama the Buddha. “Buddha” is a title of the sages and means the “illumined one”; Budhism comes from the word “Budha” (wisdom, intelligence) personified in the Purânas. He is the son of Soma (the moon in its masculine aspect or Lunus) and Târâ, the unfaithful wife of Brihaspati (the planet Jupiter), the personification of ceremonial cult, of sacrifice and other exoteric mummeries. Târâ is the soul which aspires to truth, turns away in horror from human dogma which claims to be divine, and rushes into the arms of Soma, god of mystery, of occult nature, whence is born Budha (the veiled but brilliant son), the personification of secret wisdom, of the Esotericism of the occult sciences. This Budha is by thousands of years older than the year 600 (or 300 according to certain Orientalists) before the Christian era, date assigned to the appearance of Gautama the Buddha, prince of Kapilavastu. Budhist esotericism has therefore nothing to do with the Buddhist religion, and the good and revered Sumangala has nothing to do with Theosophy in India. He has charge of the nine or ten “Branches of The Theosophical Society” in Ceylon, which with the help of theosophical missionaries become from year to year more and more free of the superstitions grafted on pure Buddhism during the reign of Tamil kings. The saintly old Sumangala labors but to bring back to its pristine purity the religion preached by his great master—religion which disdains tinsel and idols and strives to re-become that philosophy whose sublime ethic eclipses that of all other beliefs the world over. (Vide

Barthélemy Sain-Hilaire, Professor Max Müller, etc., on this subject.)

H

Once Theosophy and its principles are known, it will be demonstrated that our philosophy is not only a “close relative of modern science,” but its forbear, though greatly transcending it in logic; and that its “metaphysics” is vaster, more beautiful and more powerful than any emanating from a dogmatic cult. It is the metaphysics of Nature in her chaste nakedness, both physical, moral and spiritual, alone capable of explaining the apparent miracle by means of natural and psychic laws, and of completing the mere physiological and pathological notions of Science, and of killing for ever the anthropomorphic Gods and the Devils of dualistic religions. No one believes more firmly in the Unity of the eternal laws than do the Theosophists.

I

The Neo-Buddhism of the religion of Prince Siddhârtha Buddha will never be accepted by Europe-America for the simple reason that it will never force itself on the Occident. As to the Neo-Budhism or the “Revival of the Ancient Wisdom” of the Ante-Vedic Âryas, the actual evolutionary period of the Occidental peoples will end in a blind alley, if they reject it. Neither the true Christianity of Jesus—the great Socialist and Adept, the divine man who was changed into an anthropomorphic god—nor the sciences (which, being in their transition period, are, as Haeckel would say, rather protistae than definite sciences), nor the philosophies of today which seem to play at Blind Man’s Buff, breaking

each other’s noses, will allow the Occident to attain its full efflorescence if it turns its back upon the ancient wisdom of bygone centuries. Happiness cannot exist where Truth is absent. Erected upon the shifting sands of human fiction and hypotheses, happiness is merely a house of cards tumbling down at the first whiff; it cannot exist in reality as long as egotism reigns supreme in civilized societies. As long as intellectual progress will refuse to accept a subordinate position to ethical progress, and egotism will not give way to the Altruism preached by Gautama and the true historical Jesus (the Jesus of the pagan sanctuary, not the Christ of the Churches), happiness for all the members of humanity will remain a Utopia. Whereas the Theosophists are the only ones at present to preach this sublime altruism (even if two-thirds of The Theosophical Society should have failed in this duty), and some of them alone, in the midst of a defiant and sneering mob sacrifice themselves body and soul, honor and possessions, ready to live misunderstood and derided, if only they can succeed in sowing the good seed of a harvest which will not be theirs to reap, those who are interested in the destiny of the miserable people should at least abstain from vilifying them.

J and K

There is but one way of ever ameliorating human life and it is by the love of one’s fellow man for his own sake and not for personal gratification. The greatest Theosophist—he who loves divine truth under all its forms—is the one who works for and with the poor. There is a man known to the entire intellectual Europe-America who possibly may never have heard the name of The Theosophical Society; I mean Count Leo N. Tolstoy, author of War and Peace. This great writer is a perfect model for all aspirants to true Theosophy. He is the first in European aristocracy to have solved this problem:

“What can I do to make happy any poor man whom. I may meet?” This is what he says:

I think that it is the duty of everyone to work for all who may need help; to work with the hands, remember, a certain portion of your day. It is more practical to work with and for the poor man than to give him a portion of your intellectual labor. In the first case you help not only him who needs to be helped, but you preach by means of example to the lazy one and the beggar; you show them that you do not consider their prosaic work as being below your dignity, and thus you inculcate in him the feeling of respect and esteem for himself and of satisfaction with his destiny. If, however, you persist in working solely in your own high intellectual region and give to the poor the product of your labor, as one gives alms to the beggar, you will succeed only in encouraging his laziness and his feeling of inferiority. In doing so you establish a difference of social caste between yourself and him who accepts your alms. You take away from him his self-esteem and his confidence in you and you suggest to him aspirations to shake off the hard conditions of his existence, spent in daily physical labor, to associate himself with your life which appears to him easier than his own, to wear your garb which seems to him more beautiful than his own, and to obtain access to your social position which he considers superior to his own. It is not in this manner, owing to scientific and intellectual progress, that we can ever hope to assist the poor, or to inculcate into humanity the idea of a true fraternity.

In India the Theosophical “missionaries” labor towards the eradication of the caste idea and with a view to uniting all the castes in their fraternity. We have already seen—a thing incredible and impossible before their arrival in the country of the Sacred Cows and the Bull-Gods—Brâhmaňa and Pariah, Hindû and Buddhist, Parsi and Mohammedan, seated at the same table. When we see in republican France aristocrats and financiers

keep company with their laundrymen, or a lady of society, proud of her democratic sentiments, help a poor farmer’s wife plant her cabbage, as is done by the daughter of Count Tolstoy and by the real European Theosophists at Madras and elsewhere—then we may say that there is hope for the poor in Europe. “Aleph” confuses the priests of the public temple with the Initiates of the Sanctuaries. These latter never believed in an anthropomorphic God. The history that he gives us of the evolution of occult sciences and of the magnetic power is a fantasy. His description shows much imagination but very little knowledge of the procedures employed for the acquisition of “occult” powers.

Astrology is the mother of Astronomy, and Alchemy is the mother of Chemistry, just as the plastic soul is the mother of primitive physical man. Astrology and Alchemy are equally the soul of the two modern sciences. As long as this truth is not recognized, Astronomy and Chemistry will continue to run in a vicious circle and will produce nothing beyond materiality.

To say that occult sciences claim to command nature arbitrarily, is equivalent to saying that the sun commands the day-star to shine. Occult sciences are nature itself; intimate knowledge of their secrets does not give to the Initiates the power to command them. The truth of it is that this knowledge teaches the Adepts the manner in which to furnish certain conditions for the production of phenomena, always due to natural causes, and to the combination of forces analogous to those used by the scientists. The real difference between modern science and occult science consists in this: The first opposes to a natural force another natural force more powerful on the physical plane; the second opposes to a

physical force, a spiritual or psychic force, in other words, the soul of that same force. Those who do not believe in the human soul nor in the immortal spirit cannot recognize a fortiori a vital and potential soul in every atom of matter. This soul, whether human, animal, vegetable, or mineral, is but a ray loaned by the Universal Soul to every manifested object during the active cycle or period of the Kosmos. Those who reject this doctrine are either materialists or sectarian bigots who dread the word “Pantheism” more than the devil of their unwholesome dreams.

L

The idea of the “Great Work” associated with the idea of God and Devil would make any chela of six months smile in pity. Theosophists do not believe either in the one or in the other. They believe in the Great ALL, in Sat, i.e., absolute and infinite existence, unique and with nothing like unto it, which is neither a Being nor an anthropomorphic creature, which is, and can never not be. Theosophists see in the priest of any religion a useless if not a pernicious being. They preach against every dogmatic and infallible religion and recognize no other deity, which dispenses suffering and recompense, than Karma, an arbiter created by their own actions. The only God which they worship is TRUTH; the only devil which they recognize and which they fight against with unabated fury is the Satan of egotism and human passions.

It would be curious to learn where “Aleph” went to obtain his information on Hindû occultism. I have an idea that it was from the Brâhmanical romances of Louis Jacolliot. Well, he evidently does not know that at present the Brâhmanas are as ignorant of the occult sciences as the Buddhists of Ceylon! Of the seven esoteric keys which open Bluebeard’s closet (occultism)

they possess only one—the physiological key or the sexual “phallic” aspect of their symbols. In India, among the 150,000,000 Brâhmanas of every degree, one would not find 150 initiates, including the Yogis and Paramahamsas. “Aleph” has never heard, it would seem, that their temples have become cemeteries where lie the corpses of their once beautiful symbols and where reign supreme superstition and exploitation. If it were different, why would American Theosophists have gone to India? Why would have thousands of Brâhmanas entered The Theosophical Society eager to belong to a centre where they might encounter from time to time a true Mahâtman of flesh and blood from the other side of the “great mountain”? “Aleph” would do well to study The Secret Doctrine and to learn that the red forefather of the vanished Atlantis (the Atala of the Sûrya-Siddhânta and of Asuramaya) had for still older forbear Vâhi Sarasvatî on the island of Śambhala, when Central Asia was but a vast sea where today is Tibet and the desert of Shamo or Gobi.

M

“Aleph” recognizes the need of keeping secret dangerous sciences—chemistry for instance—and not disclosing to the crowd, even in civilized countries, the mystery of certain death-dealing combinations. Why should he then refuse to see in the law of silence forced upon Adepts, in connection with occult revelations, an act of wisdom, necessitated by the experience of the human heart?

I suspect, however, that it is precisely the intelligent and rich classes which would abuse occult powers for their own benefit and profit, much more than the ignorant and poor ones. The first law of the Sacred Science is never to use one’s knowledge for one’s own interest, but

to work with and for others. But how many people could one find in Europe-America ready to sacrifice themselves for their fellowmen? An Adept who is sick has no right to use his magnetic force to lessen his personal suffering as long as there is, to his knowledge, a single creature that suffers and whose physical or mental pain he can lessen, if not heal. It is so to speak the exaltation of the suffering of one’s self, for the benefit of the health and happiness of others. A Theosophist, if he contemplates Adeptship, must not revenge himself. He must suffer in silence rather than excite in someone else evil passions or the desire to revenge himself in his turn. Non-resistance to evil, forgiveness and charity, are the first rules of discipleship.

However, no one is expected to become a Theosophist and even less to make himself accepted as a candidate for Adeptship and occult initiation.

N

“Aleph” is right once more—in appearance; the feverish activity of Europe-America would be turbulent company for Asiatic quietism. However, polarity alone can produce the phenomenon of vitality, just as it produces, through the union of positive and negative forces, the phenomenon of gravitation. Two similar poles repel each other; as an example, see the entente cordiale, the sweet brotherhood which reigns among the Occidental nations. If the fusion of contraries does not come about, if the Englishman does not openly acknowledge the Hindû as his brother, and does not act towards him accordingly, the nations of Europe-America will end one day by devouring each other, leaving on the battlefield nothing but their tails as did the Kilkenny cats.

O

When criticizing Brâhmanism, “Aleph” is dead right, only he should know that the Brâhmanas in Vedic times knew neither castes nor widows from Malabar. His questionnaire under the letter N proves to me conclusively that he has read Jacolliot and that he judges India according to the twenty-one volumes of a writer, more prolific and charming than accurate. The Brâhmanism of which he speaks did not exist in the age of the Rishîs and it has been definitely shown that the Brâhmanas have embellished their laws of Manu in the post-Mahâbhâratean period. During the Vedic age widows remarried quite peacefully and the castes were invented but in the Kali-yuga, for reasons as occult as they were just, from the standpoint of the prosperity and the health of the races.

But what is the good of this? What do we Theosophists have to do with Brâhmanism, except to combat its abuses, since The Theosophical Society was established in India nine years ago. Ragunath Rao, a Brâhmana of the highest caste, who has presided for three years over The Theosophical Society of Madras, and who is at present Prime Minister (Dewan) of the Holkar, is the most fervent reformer in India. He is fighting, as so many other Theosophists, the law of widowhood, on the strength of texts from Manu and the Vedas. He has already freed several hundred young widows, destined to celibacy because of the loss of their husbands in their childhood, and he has made possible their remarriage in spite of the hue and cry of protest on the part of orthodox Brâhmanas. He laughs at castes; and the one hundred odd Theosophical Branches in India help him in this all-out war against superstition and ecclesiastical cruelty.

It is wrong to say that these institutions have been established during the reign of Esotericism. It is the loss of the keys to symbolism and to the laws of Manu which

has produced all the errors and all the abuses that have infiltrated into Brâhmanism. But even if these allegations were correct, what do we have in common with orthodox Brâhmanism? The horrors described by Devendro Das in “The Hindû Widow,” in the Nineteenth Century, and quoted against the Theosophists in the same issue of the Revue du Mouvement Social, p. 333 (January 1887), are entirely true. However, Devendro Das having been a Theosophist since 1879, it should be clear at last that the Theosophists fight the Brâhmanism of the pagodas, as they do all the superstitions, all the abuses, and all the injustices.

P

As it would appear from the behavior of Budhist Theosophists, servants of Wisdom and Truth, that they belong to no religion, to no sect, and that on the contrary they combat all exoteric cults and the abuses which follow therefrom, and that they endeavor to be useful to humanity, the reflections of “Aleph” are unjust. The present explanation should be sufficient to finally reestablish the truth concerning the “missionaries.” of the Himâlayas. It is precisely because occult science and esoteric philosophy have “for pivotal function the service of humanity,” because their ardent advocates try to awaken European and Asiatic peoples sleeping under the deathly shadows of clericalism, by reminding them of the lessons of the ancient wisdom—it is on account of these motives that these servants offer themselves to Europe-America. Those who would still doubt it are asked to judge the tree of Theosophy by its fruits; for by judging it by the fruits of the tree of the Brâmanical, Buddhist, or Judeo-Christian religions, they commit an evident injustice and prevent the Theosophists from being useful to their fellows, more especially to the disinherited ones of the world.

As we have already mentioned the good old Sumangala elsewhere, there is no need of our wasting time in repudiating any solidarity with Bonzes or Brâhmanas. The latter—those at least who have remained ultra-orthodox and who fight every benevolent reform—persecute us and hate us as much as do the Christian clergy and the missionaries. We break their idols; they endeavor to smash our reputations and to soil our honor; those who act in this manner are especially the servants of Christ, of him who in the first place forbade prayer to the “Father” in the temples, comparing the hypocrites to the Pharisees who perform acts of devotion at all the crossroads, and who are but whited sepulchres full of decay. However, the “Bonzes,” Buddhist priests, are, we must confess, the only ones who have really helped us in our reforms! The voice of a priest of Gautama never has been raised against us. Ceylon Buddhists have always been true brothers to the Theosophists of both Europe and America. What is happening in Tibet? The few missionaries who were able to get into that land have been struck by one remarkable fact: in the midst of the street activities at noon all the shopkeepers go home leaving all their merchandise spread openly on the sidewalk and almost on the street itself; the buyers who happen to come by see the prices marked on the articles they need, so they take them and leave their money on the counter. Upon his return, the merchant finds the payment for the merchandise that was taken; the rest remains intact. Now this is something that could hardly be found in Europe-America. This is, however, but the result of the exoteric commandments of Gautama the Buddha—who was but a sage and has never been deified. There are also no beggars in Tibet, nor people dying from hunger. Drunkenness and crime are unknown there, as well as immorality, except among the Chinese who are not “Buddhists” in the real sense of the word, no

more than the Mormons are Christians. May destiny preserve poor Tibet, with its ignorant and honest population, from the beneficence of civilization, and especially from the missionaries.

Q

May destiny protect Tibet even more from the “God Progress,” as it manifests itself in Europe-America. We are told that progress is meillorisme, “social evolution incessantly ameliorating the physical, intellectual and moral conditions of the greatest number of people.” Where did “Aleph” get that? Did he find it in London with its four million inhabitants, one million of which eat but every three days, if that often? Is it in America, where progress necessitates the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Chinese laborers, sent elsewhere to die from hunger, and the immediate expulsion of thousands of Irish immigrants and other paupers of which England is trying to rid itself? A progress built on the exploitation of poor people and of laborers is but another car of Juggernaut plus a false nose. One has the right to prefer even a quiet death under the manchineel tree to the progress of the rich and learned classes achieved over the bodies of thousands of poor and ignorant people. The Chinese of California, are they not our brothers? The Irish driven from their huts and condemned with their children to die of hunger, do they prove the existence of social progress? No, a thousand times no! As long as people, instead of fraternizing with and helping each other, claim but the right to safeguard their national interests, while the rich man refuses to understand that in helping a poor stranger he helps his poor brother in the future, and sets a good example for other countries; as long as the feeling of international altruism remains an empty phrase in the air, progress will accomplish no other function than that of executioner of the poor.

R

Let us understand each other. I am speaking of the progress of civilization on the physical plane, the progress that “Aleph” praises to the skies, playing the role of its bard. Let this material progress enter into ethics and the “missionaries” of Le Lotus and of India will recognize in you their masters. But you do nothing of the kind. You have exhausted or have contributed to the drying up of the only source of consolation for the poor, faith in his immortal Ego, and you have not given him anything else in return. Are three quarters of humanity happier due to the progress of science and its alliance with industry, about which you seem so happy? Has the invention of machines done any good to manual laborers? No, for it has resulted in one more evil: the creation among the workers of a superior caste, semi-instructed and semi-intelligent, to the disadvantage of the less favored masses which became more miserable yet. You confess it yourself: “The excessive production of things and workers . . . . creates encumbrance, plethora, poverty, deficiency, i.e., idleness and misery.” Thousands of poor children in the factories, representing for the future whole generations of crippled, ricket-ridden and unhappy people, are sacrificed in a holocaust to your progress, an insatiable and forever hungry Moloch. Yes, we protest, we say that “today is worse than yesterday,” and we deny the benefits of a progress which aims only at the welfare of the rich. The “happiness” you speak of will not come as long as moral progress slumbers in inactivity, paralyzed by the ferocious egotism of everybody, the rich as well as the poor. The revolution of 1789 has shown but one very evident result: that false fraternity which

says to his fellow man, “Think as I do, or I will knock you down; be my brother, or I will run you down!”⁴

S

The Theosophical “missionaries” aim also at a social revolution. But it is a wholly ethical revolution. It will come about when the disinherited masses understand that happiness is in their own hands, that wealth brings nothing but worries, that he is happy who works for others, for those others work for him, and when the rich realize that their felicity depends upon that of their brothers—whatever their race or religion—then only will the world see the dawn of happiness. “Aleph” asks why the world should not be eternal. Why the entities of the hierarchy which compose it should not succeed each other like the members of the species which populate our globe and the others. Is not the idea of the formation of worlds by other worlds, and of universes by other universes more rational by analogy than that of Moses or even of Laplace? “Aleph” teaches thus pure Theosophy; he is therefore a Theosophist and a “Budhist missionary” without knowing it; we hail him and welcome him with open arms. The Secret Doctrine⁵ which will be published shortly will show that at the beginning of the last periodic evolution of our globe, as well as that of its beings, the processes of generation

offered varieties not even suspected in the laboratories. The co-operation of the male and female principles, inaugurated solely by the physical man, formed only one of such processes.

T

The “finiteness” of the Kosmos has never been accepted by our “new religion,” which is not at all a religion but a philosophy. Neither Brâhmanas nor Bonzes, in their most acute exoteric delirium, have ever accepted the finiteness of the Kosmos. “Aleph” has but to open the Vedânta, Manu, the Purânas, the Buddhist Catechism, etc., to find therein a statement regarding the eternity of the Kosmos, which is but the periodic and objective manifestation of absolute eternity itself, of the forever unknown principle called Parabrahman, Âdi-Buddha, the “One and Eternal Wisdom.” If there is a still greater absurdity than to speak of a cruel God: it is to admit that God, the Great, Absolute Whole, could ever interfere in terrestrial or human affairs. The infinite cannot associate with the finite; the unconditioned ignores the conditioned and the limited. The absolute “Intelligence-Wisdom” cannot act in the restricted space of a small globe. It is omnipresent and latent in the Kosmos, infinite as itself. We find its only truly active manifestation in humanity as a whole, composed as it is of stray sparks, finite in their objective duration, eternal in their essence, issuing from that Hearth without beginning or end. Therefore, the only God whom we should serve is Humanity, and our only cult should be the love of our fellow man. Doing evil towards him, we wound God and make him suffer. When we deny our brotherly duties and refuse to consider a pagan as well as a European as our brother, we deny God. This is our religion and our dogmas.

U

Far from being unwilling to understand Europe, intellectual India, if not the Brâhmanical India of Jacolliot, favors it.

This India has never condescended to preach the God-misfortune, nor asceticism as understood by “Aleph”. This is proven by the law of Manu which enjoins marriage to the Grihastha Brâhmana, before he becomes an ascetic Brâhmana. The greatest misfortune for a Brâhmana is not to have a son, and marriage is obligatory barring the exceptional cases when the child is destined to become a Brahmachârin, a Yogi celibate, for occult reasons which cannot be enumerated here. Esotericism has never proscribed sexual or marital functions created by nature herself. Esotericism works in, with, for nature, and condemns but immorality, abuse and excess. Moreover, of all the animals, man is the most animal in his excesses; the beast has its seasons, but man has none.

“Aleph” probably speaks of Christian ascetics, those who plunge themselves into exoteric asceticism, a blessed rosary in their hands and the dogmas of the church in their heads. The Hindû becomes an ascetic only after having sufficiently studied the occult sciences to allow his spiritual nature to control his material nature. “Aleph” surely confuses the ascetics of India with the Spiritualistic mediums of Europe-America. The latter, poor sensitives and neurotics, ignore the esoteric laws, and it is they who end by creating incubi and succubi—as is proven by the discarnate wives of certain mediums in Paris itself.

The comparison between the “God of the past” and the “God of science” is neither a just nor a happy one as

the reigns of these two Gods differ very little from each other. The poor man is just as unhappy today as he was a thousand years ago, and even more so, as the gap between him and the rich man has widened.

Progress has served but to provide the rich with enjoyments unknown in the centuries of barbarism.

V

The Occident is free to refuse the hand extended to it by the Orient. However, it is not always refusing it, as is evidenced by the numerous Theosophical societies popping up like mushrooms in Europe-America.

X

Jesus, quoted by “Aleph,” upsets all the theories of the latter when he says: “My kingdom is not of this world.” Would our benevolent critic like us to admire the action of the Pharisees, and to offer their noble example to Europe-America? It would be effort wasted as the Christians of these two continents have long since delivered Theosophy into the secular hands of the pretorians of journalism. The latter crucify us daily. Up to now we have had as enemies the clergy, the missionaries (who preach brotherhood but bring to the pagans only vice and drunkenness), the Salvation Army,hypocritical and pious aristocracy, all the materialists, and even the Spiritualists who have ceased to consider us as their “dear brothers”. Alone, the intelligent socialists have understood us; will they also turn against us?

In the meantime, “Aleph” makes us listen to some profound truths. Yes, exoteric Brâhmanism must fall, but it will be replaced by esoteric Vedism, to which will be

added everything noble and beautiful that progressive science has evolved in this last century. But this revolution will not be accomplished by conquerors; it is by means of brotherly love that the fusion of the two Âryan races will be brought about, and only when the Englishman will have ceased to look upon the Brâhmana—whose genealogical tree encompasses three thousand years—as the representative of an inferior race. In his turn, the Brâhmana hates the Englishman whose temporary rule he is forced to endure. The brotherhood of the Theosophists throughout India are the only ones to see the haughty Englishman sitting down at the same table with equally arrogant Brâhmanas, mellowed and humanized by the example and the lessons of the Theosophists who serve the Masters of the Ancient Wisdom, the descendants of those Rishis and Mahâtmans which Brâhmanism has always revered, though it has ceased to understand them.

It follows, therefore, from all that precedes, that it is not the “priesthood of India” that attempts to bring the Occident back to the ancient wisdom, but rather a few Occidentals from Europe-America who, led by their Karma to the happiness of knowing certain Adepts of the secret Himâlayan Brotherhood, attempt, under the inspiration of these Masters, to lead the priesthood of India back to the primitive and divine esotericism.

Z

In this they have largely succeeded in India and in Asia. Europe-America alone still resists, incapable of understanding or of appreciating the simplicity of their goal. After all, it is only the majority who refuse to understand, that majority which has always bitten the hand that offered it help. But let us not despair. When the day, so greatly yearned for, will have arrived, when

universal and intellectual brotherhood will be accepted de facto, if not proclaimed de jure, then at long last the portals of the sanctuary, closed for many ages both to orthodox Brâhmanas and sceptical Europeans, will be flung open for the Brothers of every land. The “Grand-sire” will welcome his prodigal children, and all his intellectual treasures will be their heritage.

But in order that this time may arrive, the goal of the “missionaries” of India must be understood and their mission completely appreciated. So far the public has seen only its own distorted and grimacing image in the mirror of publicity. The object pursued by some mystical Theosophists has become, according to our ill-advised critics, the object of the entire Brotherhood; and the quid pro quo has culminated finally in the article of “Aleph” who preaches our own doctrines to us.

H. P. BLAVATSKY (F.T.S.).

Controversy Between H. P. Blavatsky and The Abbé Roca

Esotericism of Christian Dogma

CREATION as Taught by Moses and the Mahâtmans

ABBÉ Roca, Honorary Canon

[Le Lotus, Paris, Vol. II, No. 9, December, 1887, pp. 149-160. Translated from the original French by HPB]

I.—Thanks to the light which is now reaching us from the far East through the Theosophical organs published in the West, it is easy to foresee that the Catholic teaching is about to undergo a transformation as profound as it will be glorious. All our dogmas will pass from “the letter which killeth” to “the spirit which giveth life,” from the mystic and sacramental to the scientific and rational form, perhaps even to the stage of experimental methods.

The reign of faith, or mystery and miracles, is nearing its close; this is plain and was, moreover, predicted by Christ himself. Faith vanishes from the brains of men of science, to make way for the clear perception of the essential truths which had to be veiled at the origin of Christianity, under symbols and figures, so as to adapt them, as far as possible, to the needs and weaknesses of the infancy of our faith.

Strange! It is at the very hour when Europe is attaining the age of reason, and when she is visibly entering upon the full possession of her powers, that India prepares to hand on to us those loftier ideas which exactly meet our new wants, as much from the intellectual, as from the moral, religious, social and other standpoints.

One might believe that the “Brothers” kept an eye from afar on the movements of Christendom, and that from the summits of their Himalayan watch towers, they had waited expectantly for the hour when they would be able to make us hear them with some chance of being understood.

It is certain that the situation in the West is becoming more and more serious. Everyone knows whence comes the imminence of the catastrophe which threatens us; hitherto men have only evoked the animal needs, they have only awakened and unchained the brute forces of nature, the passional instincts, the savage energies of the lower Kosmos.

Christianity does indeed conceal under the profound esotericism of its Parables, those truths, scientific, religious, and social, which this deplorable situation imperiously demands, but sad to say, sad indeed for a priest, hard, hard indeed for Christian ears to hear, all our priesthoods, that of the Roman Catholic Church equally with those of the Orthodox Russian, the Anglican, the Protestant, and the Anglo-American churches, seem struck with blindness and impotence in face of the glorious task which they would have to fulfil in these terrible circumstances. They see nothing; their eyes are plastered and their ears walled up. They do not discover; one is tempted to say, they do not even suspect what ineffable truths are hidden under the dead letter of their teachings.

Say, is it not into that darkness that we are all stumbling, in State and in Church, in politics as in religion? A double calamity forming but one for the peoples, which suffer horribly under it, and for our civilization which may be shipwrecked on it at any moment. May God deliver us from a war at this moment!

It would be a cataclysm in which Europe would break to pieces in blood and fire, as Montesquieu foresaw: “Europe will perish through the soldiers, if not saved in time.”

We must escape from this empiricism and this fearful confusion. But who will save us? The Christ, the true Christ, the Christ of esoteric science.¹ And how? Thus: the same key which, under the eyes of the scientific bodies, shall open the secrets of Nature, will open their own intellects to the secrets of true Sociology; the same key which, under the eyes of the priesthoods, shall open the Arcana of the mysteries and the gospel parables, will open their intellects to these same secrets of Sociology. Priests and savants will then develop in the radiance of one and the same light.

And this key—I can assert it, for I have proved it in application to all our dogmas—this key is the same which the Mahâtmas offer and deliver to us at this moment.²

There is here an interposition of Providence, before which we should all of us offer up our own thanksgivings. For my part, I am deeply touched by it; I feel I know not what sacred thrill! My gratitude is the more keen since, if I confront the Hindu tradition with the occult theosophic traditions of Judeo-Christianity, from its origin to our own day, through the Holy Kabbala, I can recognize clearly the agreement of the teaching of the “Brothers” with the esoteric teaching of Moses, Jesus, and St. Paul.

¹ “The Christ of esoteric science” is the Christos of Spirit—an impersonal principle entirely distinct from any carnalised Christ or Jesus. Is it this Christos that the learned Canon Roca means? — H.P.B.

² The capitals are our own; for these “Mahatmas” are the real Founders and “Masters” of the Theosophical Society. — H.P.B.

People are sure to say: “You abase the West before the East, Europe before Asia, France before India, Christianity before Buddhism. You are betraying at once your Country and your Church, your quality as a Frenchman, and your character as a Priest.” Pardon me, gentlemen! I abase nothing whatever; I betray nothing at all! A member of Humanity, I work for the happiness of Humanity; a son of France, I work for the glory of France, a Priest of Jesus Christ, I work for the triumph of Jesus Christ. You shall be forced to confess it; suspend, therefore, your anathemas, and listen, if you please!

We are traversing a frightful crisis. For the last hundred years we have been trying to round the Cape of Social Tempests, which I spoke of before; we have been enduring, without intermission, the fires, the lightnings, the thunders, and the earthquakes of an unparalleled hurricane, and we feel, clearly enough, that everything is giving way around us; under our feet and over our heads! Neither pontiffs, nor savants, nor politicians, nor statesmen, show themselves capable of snatching us from the abysses towards which we are being, one is tempted to say, driven by a fatality! If, then, I discover, in the distant East, through the darkness of this tempest, the blessed star which alone can guide us, amidst so many shoals, safe and sound to the longed-for haven of safety, am I wanting in patriotism and religion because I announce to my brethren the rising of this beneficent star?

I know as well as you that it was said to Peter: “I will give thee the Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, that thou mayest open its gates upon earth”; yes, doubtless, but note the tense of this verb: I will give thee: in the future. Has the Christian Pontiff already received them—those magic Keys? Before replying look and see what Rome has made of Christendom; see the lamentable state of Europe; not only engaged in open war with foreign

nationalities, but also exhausting herself in fratricidal wars and preparations to consummate her own destruction; behold everywhere Christian against Christian, church against church, priesthood against priesthood, class against class, school against school, and, often in the same family, brother against brother, sons against their father, the father against his sons! What a spectacle! And a Pope presides over it! And while, all around, men prepare for a general slaughter, he, the Pope, thinks only of one thing—of his temporal domain, of his material possessions! Think you that this state of things forms the Kingdom of Heaven, and say you still that the Pontiff of Rome has already received the Keys thereof?

It is written, perchance, in the decrees of Providence that these mysterious Keys shall be brought to the brethren of the West by the “Brothers” of the East. Hence it would be Christ himself who would be directing this occult movement in order to realize his own saying:— “I will give thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven” [Matt., xvi, 19], by making them pass from the hands of the Mahatmas into thy hands, O Peter, and the original phenomenon will thus be seen re-enacted: the Magi of the Orient will come a second time to adore Christ, not in the stable among the beasts this time, on the throne of abasement and suffering, but on the Tabor of his transfiguration, in the light of all the sciences and on the throne of his glory. Such is, indeed, the expectation of all the nations; the prophetic East sighs for the tenth incarnation of Vishnu, which shall be the crown of all the Avatars which have preceded it, and the Apocalypse, on its side, announces the appearance of the While Horse which is the symbol of the Christ risen, glorious and triumphant before the eyes of all the peoples of the earth.

This is how I, priest of Jesus Christ, betray Jesus Christ, when I acclaim the wisdom of the Mahatmas and their mission in the West!

I have spoken of the opportuneness of the hour chosen by them for coming to our help. I must insist upon this point.

“The phenomena of motion,” by means of which men of science claim to explain everything, explain nothing at all, because the very cause of that motion is unknown to our physicists as they themselves admit. “Consider,” say to us the Mahatmas by the mouth of their Adepts, “that behind each physical energy is hidden another energy, which itself serves as envelope to a spiritual force which is the living soul of every manifested force.”

And thus Nature offers us an infinite series of forces one within another, serving mutually as sheaths, which, as d’Alembert suspected, produce all sensible phenomena and reach all points of the circumference starting from a central point, which is God.

II.—I can now, after these preliminaries, give an example of the transformation, which, thanks to the Mahatmas, will soon take place in the teaching of the Christian Church. I will take particularly the dogma of the Creation, informing my readers that they will find in a book I am preparing, New Heavens and New Earth, an analogous work on all the dogmas of the Catholic faith.

Matter exists in states of infinite variety, and, sometimes, even of opposite appearance. The world is constituted in two poles, the North or Spiritual, and the

South or Material pole; these two poles correspond perfectly and differ only in form, that is, in appearance.

Regarded from above, as the Easterns regard it, the universal substance presents the aspect of a spiritual or divine emanation; looked at from below, as the Westerners are in the habit of viewing it, it offers, on the contrary, the aspect of a material creation.

One sees at once the difference which must exist between the two intellectualities and, consequently, between the two civilizations of the East and the West. Yet there is no more error in the Genesis of Moses, which is that of the Christian teaching, than there is in the Genesis of the Mahatmas, which is that of the Buddhist doctrine. The one and the other of these Geneses are absolutely founded on one and the same reality. Whether one descends or ascends the scale of being, one only traverses, in the East from above downwards, in the West from below upwards, the same ladder of essences, more or less spiritualized, more or less materialized, according as one approaches to, or recedes from, Pure Spirit, which is God.

It was, therefore, not worthwhile to fulminate so much on one side or the other, here, against the theory of emanation, there, against the theory of Creation. One always comes back to the principle of Hermes Trismegistus: the universe is dual, though formed of a single substance. The Kabbalists knew it well, and it was taught long ago in the Egyptian sanctuaries, as the occultists have never ceased to repeat it in the temples of India.

It will soon be demonstrated, I hope, by scientific experiments such as those of Mr. William Crookes, the Academician, that everywhere throughout all nature,

spirit and matter are not two but one and that they nowhere offer a real division in life. Under every physical force there is a spiritual or a psychic force: in the heart of the minutest atom is hidden a vital soul, the presence of which has been perfectly determined by Claude Bernard in germs imperceptible to the naked eye. “This soul, human, animal, vegetable or mineral, is but a ray lent by the universal soul to every object manifested in the Kosmos.”

“Corporeal man and the sensible universe, says the theosophical doctrine, are but the appearance imparted to them by the cohesion of the inter-atomic or inter-astral forces which constitute both exteriorly. The visible side of a being is an ever-changing Mâyâ.” The language of St. Paul is in no way different: “The aspect of the world,” he says, “is a passing vision, an image which passes and renews itself continually—transit figura huius mundi.”

The real man, or the microcosm—and one can say as much of the macrocosm—is an astral force which reveals itself through this physical appearance, and which, having existed before the birth of this form, does not share its fate at the hour of death: surviving its destruction. The material form cannot subsist without the spiritual force which sustains it; but the latter is independent of the former, for form is created by spirit, and not spirit by form.”

This theory is word for word that of the “Brothers” and the Adepts, at the same time it is that of the Kabbalists and the Christians of the School of Origen, and the Johannine Church.

There could not be a more perfect agreement.

Transfer this teaching to the genesis of the Kosmos and you have the secret of the formation of the World; at the same time you discover the profound meaning of the saying of St. Paul: “The invisible things of God are made visible to the eye of man through the visible things of the creation,” a saying so well translated by Joseph de Maistre as follows: “The world is a vast system of invisible things, visibly organized.”

The whole of the Kosmos is like a two-faced medal of which both faces are alike. The materialists know only the lower side, while the occultists see it from both sides at once; from the front and from the back.

It is always nature, and the same nature, but natura naturata from below, natura naturans from above; here, intelligent cause; there, brute effect; spiritual above, corporeal below, etherealized at the North, concreted at the South Pole.

The distinction accepted everywhere in the West down to our own day, as essential and radical, between spirit on the one hand and matter on the other, is no longer sustainable. The progress of science, spurred on as it will be by Hindu ideas, will soon force the last followers of this infantile belief to abandon it as ridiculous.

Yes, all, absolutely all in the world is life, but life differently organized and variously manifested through phenomena which vary infinitely from the most spiritualized beings, such as the Angels, as well known to Buddhists as to Christians, though called by other names, down to the most solidified of beings, such as stones and metals. In the bosom of the latter, sleep, in a cataleptic condition, milliards of vital elementary spirits. These latter only await, to thrill into activity, the stroke of the

pick or hammer to which they will owe their deliverance and their escape from the limbus, of which the Hindu doctrine speaks as well as the Catholic. Here lies, for these souls of life, the starting point of the Resurrection and the Ascension, taught equally by both the Eastern and the Western traditions, but not understood among us.

But as they ascend, so the spirits can also descend, for they are always free to transfigure themselves in the divine light, or to bury themselves in the satanic shadow of error and evil. Hence, while time is time, “these ceaseless tears and gnashing of teeth” of which the gospel Parables speak metaphorically, and which will last as long as shall last the elaboration of the social atoms destined for the collective composition of the beatific Nirvâna.

Nature is ever placing under our eyes examples of organic transformations, analogous to those I am speaking of, as if to aid us in comprehending our own destiny. But it seems that many men “have eyes in order not to see,” as Jesus said. See how in order to remove these cataracts, science, even in the West, constantly approaching more and more that of the East, is at work producing in its turn phenomena, which corroborate at once the Parables of the Gospels and the teachings of nature. I will not speak of the Salpêtrière and the marvels of hypnotism in the hands of Monsieur Charcot and his numerous disciples throughout the whole world. There are things that strike me even more.

Monsieur Pictet, at Geneva, is creating diamonds with air and light. This should not astonish those who know that our coal mines are nothing but “stored-up sunlight.” With an even more marvelous industry, do not the flowers extract from the atmosphere the luminous substance of which they weave their fine and joyous garments? And “all that is sown in the earth under a

material form does it not rise under a spiritual form,” as St. Paul says?

The glorious entities, which we call celestial spirits, have themselves an organic form. It is defined in the canons of our dogma, whatever the ignorance-mongers of ultramontanism may pretend. God alone has no body, God alone is pure Spirit—and even to speak thus we must consider the Deity apart from the person of Jesus Christ, for in the “Word made flesh” God dwells corporeally, according to the true and beautiful saying of St. Paul.

And it is because God has no body that he is present everywhere in the infinite, under the veils of cosmic light and ether, which serve as his garment and under the electric, magnetic, inter-atomic, interplanetary, interstellar and sound fluids, which serve him as vehicles.

And it is also because God has no created form that the Kabbala could, without error, call him Non-Being. Hegel probably felt this esoteric truth when he spoke, in his heavy and cumbrous language, of the equivalence of Being and Non-Being.

All visible forms are thus the product, at the same time as they are the garment and the manifestation, of spiritual forces. All sensible order is, in reality, an organic concretion, a sort of living crystallization of intelligent powers fallen from the state of spirituality into the state of materiality; in other words, fallen from the North to the South pole of nature, in consequence of a catastrophe called by Holy Scripture the Fall from Eden. This cataclysm was the punishment of a frightful crime, of an audacious revolt spoken of in the traditions of all Temples and called in our dogma original sin. The primary priesthood of the Christian church has hitherto

lacked the light needed to explain this biological phenomenon, which is an ascertained fact of physiology and sociology, as I hope to prove. Questioned on this point, the priests have always replied: It is a mystery. Now there are no mysteries save for ignorance, and the Christ announced that “every hidden thing should be brought to light, and proclaimed on the house-tops”.

This is why so many new lights, coming from the East and elsewhere, enter scientifically, in our day, into the Christian mind.

Glory to the Theosophists, glory to the Adepts, glory to the Kabbalists, glory above all to the Hermetists everywhere, glory to those new missionaries whose coming Monsieur de Maistre foresaw, and whom Monsieur de Saint-Yves d’Alveydre lately hailed as the elect of God, charged by him to establish a communion of knowledge and of love between all the religious centres of the earth!

Priests of the Roman Catholic Church, we shall enter in our turn this wise communion of saints, on the day when we shall consent to read anew our sacred texts, no longer in “the dead letter” of their exotericism, but in the “living spirit” of their esotericism, and in the threefold sense which Christian tradition has always canonically recognized in them.

L’ABBÉ ROCA (Chanoine).

Château de Pollestres, France.

This is a very optimistic way of putting it, and if realized would be like pouring the elixir of life into the decrepit body of the Latin Church. But what will his Holiness the Pope say to it? — H.P.B.

Notes On Abbé Roca’s

“ESOTERICISM OF CHRISTIAN DOGMA”

[Le Lotus, Paris, Vol. II, No. 9, December, 1887, pp. 160-173]

In the opening pages of this essay—so remarkable for its sincerity and its boldness—the author [Abbé Roca] raises and solves this question: “Who can say whether the time in history in which we find ourselves is not the one when the great saying of Jesus Christ shall be fulfilled: ‘And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd’.” [John, x, 16.] Several facts of past and present history militate against this optimistic hope.

To begin with, there are the teachings and the doctrines of Eastern Esotericism, which anticipate the Kalki-Avatâra at the end of Kali-Yuga, while we are only at the beginning of it now.¹

Then there is the esoteric interpretation of the Christian texts which, read in the light of, and translated into, “the language of the Mysteries,” show us the identity of the fundamental and definitely universal truths; by this means, the four Gospels, as well as the Bible of Moses and everything else, from the first to the last, clearly appear to be a symbolic allegory of the same primitive mysteries and the Cycle of Initiation.

In carnalizing the central figure of the New Testament, in imposing the dogma of the Word made flesh, the Latin Church sets up a doctrine diametrically

¹ The Kali-Yuga lasts 432,000 years, and the first 5,000 years thereof will not have expired until 1897.

opposed to the tenets of Buddhist and Hindu Esotericism and the Greek Gnosis. Therefore, there will always be an abyss between the East and the West, as long as neither of these dogmas yields. Almost 2,000 years of bloody persecution against Heretics and Infidels by the Church looms before the Oriental nations to prevent them from renouncing their philosophic doctrines in favor of that which degrades the Christos principle.¹

Then again statistics are available to prove that two-thirds of the population of the globe are still far from agreeing to gravitate to “one single Shepherd.” Armies of missionaries are sent to every corner of the earth; money by the millions is sacrificed by Rome every year and by tens of millions by the 350 to 360 Protestant sects, and what is the result of so much effort? The disclosure of a celebrated Bishop (Bishop Temple), based on statistics, tells us! Since the beginning of our century, where the Christian missionaries have made but three million converts, the Mohammedans have acquired two hundred million proselytes without the cost of one cent! Africa alone belongs almost entirely to Islam. A sign of the times!

I stated that the New Testament is but a Western allegory founded upon the universal Mysteries, the first historical traces of which, in Egypt alone, go back at least to 6,000 years before the Christian era. I am about to prove this.

The allegory is that of the Cycle of Initiation, a new version of the mysteries, at once psychical and astronomical. Sabeism and Heliolatry are therein intimately linked to that other mystery, the Incarnation of

¹ An explanation of this word will be found later on. — Editor, Le Lotus.

the Word or the descent into the human race of the divine Fiat, symbolized in the story of Elohim-Jehovah and the Adam of clay. Hence, psychology and astrolatry (whence astronomy) cannot be separated therein.

These same fundamental mysteries are found in the sacred texts of every nation, of every people, from the beginning of the conscious life of humanity; but when one legend based upon these mysteries attempts to arrogate exclusive rights to itself above all the rest; when it declares itself an infallible dogma to force the popular faith into a dead letter belief, to the detriment of the true metaphysical meaning, such a legend must be denounced, its veil torn away, and itself displayed in its nakedness to the world!

Thus it is useless to speak of the esoteric identity of universal beliefs until one has thoroughly studied and understood the true esoteric sense of these two original terms: Chrêstos (χρηστός) and Christos (χριστός): two poles as opposed in their significance as night and day, suffering and humility, joy and glorification, etc. The true Christians died with the last of the Gnostics, and the Christians of our day are but the usurpers of a name they no longer understand. As long as this is the case, Orientals cannot agree with Occidentals; no blending of religious ideas would be possible between them.

It is said that after the Kalki-Avatâra (“He who is expected” on the White Horse, in the Apocalypse) the Golden Age will begin and every man will become his own guru (spiritual teacher or “Shepherd”) because the divine Logos, whatever name it may be given¹ will reign

¹ Whether it be Krishna, Buddha, Sosiosh, Horus or Christos, it is a universal principle; the "God-Men" are of all periods and innumerable.

in each regenerated mortal. There can be no question, then, of a common “Shepherd” unless that Shepherd be entirely metaphorical. Moreover, the Christians, by localizing and isolating this great Principle, and denying it to any other man except Jesus of Nazareth (or the Nazar), carnalize the Christos of the Gnostics; that alone prevents them having any point in common with the disciples of the Archaic Wisdom.

Western Theosophists accept the Christos as did the Gnostics of the centuries that preceded Christianity, as do the Vedântins their Krishna: they distinguish the corporeal man from the divine Principle, which, in the case of the Avatâra, animates him. Their Krishna, the historical hero, is mortal, but the divine Principle (Vishnu) which animates him, is immortal and eternal; Krishna—the man and his name—remains terrestrial at his death; he does not become Vishnu; Vishnu absorbs only that part of himself which had animated the Avatâra, as it animates so many others.

Now the word Christos is in reality but a translation of the word Kris,¹ and that name is certainly anterior to the year 1 of our era by thousands of years. The proof of this is in that fragment of the Erythraean Sibyl where we find the words: ΙΗΣΟϒΣ ΧΡΕΙΣΤΟΣ ΘΕΟϒ ϒΙΟΣ ΣΩΤΗΡ ΣΤΑϒΡΟΣ. That phrase which has become so famous among Christians, is in reality but a series of nominatives of which one can make what he likes. The Church has hastened to draw from it a prophecy of the coming of Jesus. The phrase had, however, nothing to do with our era, as is proved both by history—from the 1^st

¹ An esoteric term for the word anointed. Georg Curtius sees the origin of all these terms, ϰρις ϰράω ϰρητός in the Sanskrit gharsh (Greek ϰϵρ). —Principles of Greek Etymology, Vol. I, p. 236.

of January of the year 1, to the 1^st of January, 1888 A. D.—and the actual text of the Sibylline fragment.

In fact, this universal and entirely pagan prophecy, dating from the beginning of our race, promises us the return of the golden age as soon as “the Child,” that has been foretold, is born, and whose birth is as allegorical as it is metaphysical. It has nought to do with any particular man, any immaculate woman; it is entirely mythological in its form; astronomical and theogonic in its hidden meaning. In all ages and among all peoples, the Myth-Messiah is born of a Virgin-Mother. Witness Krishna and Devaki; see the Buddhist legend grafted upon the historical Gautama the Buddha and his Mother Maya; notice that which was added to the biography of Pharaoh Amenhotep III, born of a Virgin-Mother, Queen Mut-em-ua, during the XVIIth Dynasty. Examine also the inside walls of the Sanctum Sanctorum in the temple of Luxor, built by the same Pharaoh, and you will see four very significant scenes: first, there is the god Thoth the lunar Mercury, the Egyptian Gods’ Messenger of the annunciation, the Gabriel of the Book of the Dead saluting the Virgin Queen and announcing to her the birth of a son; then, there is the god Kneph helped by Hathor (the Holy Ghost under its two aspects, masculine and feminine, like the Sophia of the Gnostics which was transformed into the Holy Ghost), preparing and making ready the germ of the coming child; then, the mother in travail, seated on the stool of the mid-wife, who receives the newly-born in a cave; and, lastly, the scene of the Adoration. Gerald Massey, the English Egyptologist, describes this last scene as follows:

. . . . . Here the child is enthroned, receiving homage from the Gods and gifts from men. Behind the deity Kneph, on the right, three spirits—the Three Magi, or Kings of the Legend, are kneeling and offering presents

with their right hand, and life with their left. The child thus announced, incarnated, born, and worshipped, was the Pharaonic representative of the Aten Sun in Egypt, the God Adon of Syria, and Hebrew Adonai; the child-Christ of the Aten Cult; the miraculous conception of the ever-virgin mother, personated by Mut-em-ua, as mother of the “only-one,” and representative of the divine mother of the youthful Sun-God.¹

It is unnecessary to repeat the legend of Krishna and Devakî, of his miraculous birth, of the shepherds who took care of him, of the Rishis who saluted him, or of the Indian Herod, King Kamsa, who ordered the massacre of 40,000 new-born males, in the hope of killing Krishna, one who was to dethrone him, among them.

And has the golden age, sung by Virgil and the Sibyl, come at last? Where shall we look for it? Is it in the first centuries of Christianity when the pagans, in order to protect their Gods, massacred the Nazarenes? Is it when the latter, openly declaring themselves Christians, started drowning the gods of the heathens in torrents of human blood, in the name of Him who had preached to them, as they said, brotherly and universal love, even to their enemies, charity unto forgiveness, and the forgetting of injuries? Or is it in those centuries when the Holy Inquisition ruled, that humanity enjoyed its golden Age, its universal peace, material or moral? Or again, is it when the armies of Europe stand prepared to spring upon and exterminate each other, while legions of unfortunates perish of hunger and cold under the blessing of the Vicar of Christ (endowed with 20 millions for his jubilee) and morality in Christian and civilized countries sinks below that of wild beasts?

¹ Lecture on “The Historical Jesus and Mythical Christ” p. 5, 2^nd para.

The fact is that the true meaning of the Sibyl’s words is really known only to the Adepts; and it is not by the Cross of Calvary that they can be interpreted.

I have not the slightest intention of hurting the feelings of those who believe in Jesus, the carnalized Christ, but I feel myself compelled to emphasize our own belief while explaining it, because the Abbé Roca wishes to identify it with that of the Roman Church; never can these two beliefs be united, unless the Catholicism of the Latin Church returns to its earliest tenets, those of the Gnostics. For the Church of Rome was Gnostic—just as much as the Marcionites were—until the beginning and even the middle of the second century; Marcion, the famous Gnostic, did not separate from it until the year 136, and Tatian left it still later. And why did they leave it? Because they had become heretics, the Church pretends; but the history of these cults contributed by esoteric manuscripts gives us an entirely different version. These famous Gnostics, they tell us, separated themselves from the Church because they could not agree to accept a Christ made flesh, and thus began the process of carnalizing the Christ-principle. It was then also that the metaphysical allegory experienced its first transformation—that allegory which was the fundamental doctrine of all the Gnostic fraternities.¹

¹ The Gnostics were actually divided into various fraternities, such as: Essenes, Therapeuts, Nazarenes or Nazars (from which Jesus of Nazareth); “James,” the Lord's brother, head of the Church of Jerusalem, was a Gnostic to his finger tips, an ascetic of the old Biblical type, i.e., a Nazar dedicated to asceticism from his birth. The razor had never touched his head or beard. He was such a one as Jesus is represented to be in legends or pictures and such as are all the “Brother-Adepts” of every country; from the yogi-fakir of India to the greatest Mahatmas among the Initiates of the Himâlayas.

One fact is enough to prove that the Roman Church has abandoned even the tradition preserved by the Greek Church, in that it has adopted the solar tonsure¹ proper to the Egyptian priests of the public temples, and to the lamas and bonzes of the popular Buddhist cult: this is sufficient to demonstrate that the Church of Rome is the one that has wandered farthest from the real religion of the mystical Christ.

Therefore, the time is still far distant when “all the people of the universe will form one flock under one shepherd.” Human nature will have to be completely modified before it occurs. We will have to attain the Seventh Race, according to the prophecy of the Book of Dzyan,² because it is then that the “Christos”—designated by his various pagan names, as well as those of the Gnostics “heretics”—will reign in the soul of every individual, in the soul of all those who shall have first accepted the Chrêst³—I do not say simply those who will have become Christians, which is quite another thing. For, let us proclaim it once for all, the word Christ, which means the glorified, the triumphant, and also the “anointed” (from the word χρίω, to anoint) cannot be applied to Jesus. Even according to the Gospels, Jesus was never anointed, either as High Priest, as King or as Prophet. “As a mortal,” remarks Nork, “he was anointed only once, by a woman, and not because he offered himself as king or High Priest, but, as he said himself, for his burial.” Jesus was a Chrêstos: χρηστὸς ὁ

¹ Magnetic and psychic force resides in the hair; hence the myth of Samson and others like him in antiquity.

² A Tibetan word, the Sanskrit Jñâna, occult wisdom, knowledge.

³ A word which is neither the Krest (cross) of the Slavs, nor the crucified “Christ” of the Latins. The Ray made manifest from that Centre of Life which is hidden from the eyes of Humanity for and in Eternity, the Christos, crucified as a body of flesh and bones!!!

Κύριος (the Lord is good), as St. Peter said (1^st Epistle, ii, 3), whether he actually lived during the Christian era or a century earlier, in the reign of Alexander Jannaeus and his wife Salome, at Lüd, as stated in the Sepher Toldoth Jeshu.¹

And there were other ascetics in the condition of Chrêstos, even in his time: all those who, entering upon the arduous path of asceticism, traveled on the road which leads to Christos,—the divine light—all those were in the Chrêstos state, ascetics belonging to the oracular temples (χρηστήριος from χράω belonging to an oracle; and χρηστήριον vehicle of an oracle, sacrifice and victim). This was all part of the cycle of initiation; anyone who wants to be convinced of it has merely to investigate. No “sacrificial victim” could be united to Christ triumphant before passing through the preliminary stage of the suffering Chrêst who was put to death.

Astronomically, it was the death of the Sun,² but death, the precursor of the New Sun,³ engenders life in the bosom of darkness.

¹ Having drawn to Madame Blavatsky's attention that, according to certain scholars, this assertion is erroneous, she answered as follows: “I say the scholars are either lying or talking nonsense. Our Masters affirm the statement. If the story of Jehoshua or Jesus Ben-Pandira is false, then the whole Talmud, the whole Jewish Canon is false. He was the disciple of Jehoshua Ben Perahiah, the fifth President of the Sanhedrin after Ezra who re-wrote the Bible. Compromised in the revolt of the Pharisees against Jannaeus in 105 B.C., he [Jehoshua Ben Parahiah] fled into Egypt carrying the young Jesus with him. This account is far truer than that of the New Testament which has no record in history.”

² Upon the cross of the autumnal equinox, the point where the ecliptic crosses the equator, and where the sun descends into that latter circle, announcing winter, death.

³ Christmas, when the sun reascends towards the Equator after having passed the Winter Solstice, announcing Spring, the renewal, Easter.

Psychologically, it was the death of the senses and the flesh, the resurrection of the spiritual Ego, the Christos in each one of us.

Yes, it is indeed the Christos himself who directs this occult movement; but if it is so, it is not with the idea that Saint Peter, who denied his Christ three times, should receive the keys of the mysteries from the hands of the Mahatmas, nor that the latter should re-enact the scene of the three Magi-Kings. It is hardly necessary to repeat again that which other Mahatmas, the Hierophants of Egypt, repeated every 19 years, according to the Metonic Cycle, five or six thousand years, at least, before the XIXth century. The astronomical Christos can have but one anniversary of birth and of resurrection in 19 years, as shown by Gerald Massey, because his parents are the Sun and the Moon, the heavenly bodies which accompany “the Man crucified in Space,” which images preceded even the figure described by Plato. That day, consecrated by a ceremony, was fixed in Egypt according to the full moon of Easter.¹

As stated by the London Egyptologist and lecturer quoted above:

The birthplace of the Egyptian Messiah [Horus] at the Vernal Equinox was figured in Apt, or Apta, the corner. . . ²

But Apta also means the Crib and the Manger, therefore the child born in the Apta was supposed to be

¹ Among the Christians also, the day of the Nativity is determined by the full moon of Easter, a strange coincidence!

² [“The Historical Jesus and Mythical Christ,” p. 7]

born in the Crib, and this Apta, as Crib, is the hieroglyphic sign of the birthplace of the Sun.¹

This point was indicated by the intersection of the Colure of the Equinox with the Equator, and as it passed from sign to sign, the corresponding star of the Orient (or of the East) served to mark its position.

. . . . . When the birthplace was in the sign of the Bull, Orion was the star that rose in the East to tell where the young Sun God was reborn. Hence it is called the “Star of Horus.” That was then the star of the “Three Kings” who greeted the Babe; for the “Three Kings” is still a name of the three stars in Orion’s Belt . . .²

And our author adds:

Plutarch also tells us how the Mithraic Cult had been particularly established in Rome about the year 70 B.C.³ And Mithras was fabled as having been born in a cave. Wherever Mithras was worshipped the cave was consecrated as his birthplace. The cave can be identified, and the birth of the Messiah in that cave, no matter under what name he was born, can be definitely dated. The “Cave of Mithras” was the birthplace of the Sun in the Winter Solstice, when this occurred on the 25th of December in the sign of the Sea-Goat, with the Vernal Equinox in the sign of the Ram. Now the Akkadian name of the tenth month, that of the Sea-Goat, which answers roughly to our December, the tenth by name, is Abba Uddu, that is, the “Cave of Light”; the cave of re-birth for the Sun in the lowest depth at the Solstice, figured as the Cave of Light. . . . .

¹ The Egyptians carried the newborn in its crib through the streets of Alexandria.

² [Op. cit., p. 7.]

³ [Lives: Life of Pompey, ch. 24.]

This cave was continued as the birthplace of the Christ. You will find it in all the Gospels of the Infancy, and Justin Martyr says, “Christ was born in the Stable, and afterwards took refuge in the Cave.” He likewise vouches for the fact that Christ was born on the same day that the Sun was re-born in Stabula Augiae, or, in the Stables of Augias. Now the cleansing of this Stable was the sixth labour of Heracles, his first being in the sign of the Lion; and Justin was right; the Stable and Cave are both figured in the same Celestial Sign. But mark this! The cave was the birthplace of the Solar Messiah from the year 2410 to the year 255 B.C.; at which later date the Solstice passed out of the Sea-Goat into the sign of the Archer; and no Messiah, whether called Mithras, Adon, Tammuz, Horus or Christ, could have been born in the Cave of Abba Uddu or the Stable of Augias on the 25th of December after the year 255 B.C., therefore Justin had nothing but the Mithraic tradition of the by-gone birthday to prove the birth of the Historical Christ 255 years later!¹

Thus, with mathematics and astronomy to help us, it has been demonstrated that Jesus could not have been born December 25, 255 years later; the Precession of the Equinoxes, or the Sidereal increment forbids it.

It is in this ancient wisdom, and in the Christos of the Gnostics under its various names, that the Theosophists, disciples of the Mahatmas, believe. Is the Abbé Roca ready to make the Pope accept this belief, and to accept it himself?—I doubt it. What, then, can we do?

The Abbé Roca quotes us passages from Paul speaking of the “Word made flesh” and of a God existing corporeally; but the Abbé Roca is too learned to deny that the Epistles of St. Paul have not come down to us entirely immaculate. For several centuries the Church refused

¹ [Massey, op. cit., pp. 6-7.]

them a place among orthodox scriptures, as it did also the Revelation of St. John, and when these two books were accepted, they were, as is definitely proved, in a mutilated form.

But for that, the great enemy of St. Peter would have made but one mouthful of the apostle of the circumcision. That is why, to the expression advanced, “the Word made flesh,” Theosophists—Gnostic and Buddhist—could oppose these other words of Paul’s asking whether the Galatians are foolish enough—after beginning with faith in Spirit—to fall back into a belief in a corporeal god; for that is the esoteric meaning of what he says in his Epistle to the Galatians, iii, 3, etc.

There is another extraordinary thing that the Abbé Roca really ought to explain to us. It would appear, from every calculation, that Paul had been converted to Christ three or four years before the crucifixion of Jesus! Thus, according to the Acts, his vision dated from the year 30 or 31, but according to what he also told the Galatians, it must have occurred in the year 27. He said, in fact, that he had not gone to Jerusalem for three years after his conversion (Gal., i, 18 et seq.), and after this he spoke (Ibid., ii, 1 et seq.) of returning there fourteen years later, with Barnabas and Titus. Now, “the date of that second visit at least, if not of the first, can be historically fixed, because it was made during the great famine that is known to have occurred in the year 44, when Paul and Barnabas sent relief to the poor.” If then we subtract 17 from the date of 44, it follows that St. Paul was converted in the year 27, that is, while Jesus still lived! And that can hardly be explained unless, as Gerald Massey proves (thus corroborating the facts taught in the secret books of the Gnosis—see Isis Unveiled, Vol. II),¹ Paul had been

¹ [Compare passages on pp. 89-91, 137 and 162 footnote.]

converted, not to Jesus of Nazareth, but to the Christos of the Gnostics. In his Epistles he has been made to fulminate against the heretics, but these heretics were actually Peter, James, and the other Apostles.

I am ignorant of what the erudite Abbé Roca intends to disclose to the world in his next volume on the subject of the “Fall from Eden” which he regards as a cataclysm, “punishment of a frightful crime, of an audacious revolt”; but I can assure him that the opinion of the “Theosophists-Chelas” upon the subject is already formed in advance.

The terrible crime was merely the natural result of the law of evolution: that is the races—hardly solidified at first—of our androgynous and semi-ethereal prototypes, materializing themselves little by little, taking on a physical body, then separating into distinct males and females, finally procreated carnally after they had formerly created their likenesses by entirely different methods which will be explained some day (if, however, one may express by the word create an idea quite contrary to that of engender).

This “audacious revolt” is again an anthropomorphic and personifying allegory that we owe to the Church, which materialized, in order to disguise them the better, all the ancient ideas—old as the world. It was a philosophic doctrine imbedded in the esoteric meaning of the Promethean legend. The sacred fire which he stole from the Gods is the flame of conscious intellect, the spark which animates the fifth principle, or Manas; it is also the generating and sexual flame; that spark is the reflection—if not the very essence—of the Archangels or Monads, forced by their karma from the preceding manvantara, to incarnate in the astral forms of the third great pre-Adamite race before its “fall”—the fall of Spirit

into Matter. That supposed “revolt,” that “theft” of the creative fire, is a result of Evolution (of which the Darwinian theory is but the rough exterior husk on the physical or material plane).

Once endowed with the creative fire, completely evolved mankind had no further need for the help of the Powers or creative Gods, such as the Elohim of chapter ii of Genesis. Men became creative Gods, in their turn, able to give life to beings like themselves; whence the Greek allegory of Ouranos mutilated by Saturn-Kronos, who in turn finds himself mutilated by his son Jupiter; the allusion is perfectly transparent; since men had discovered, thanks to Prometheus, the secret of the various methods of creation, and were creating in their turn, what was the use of god-creators?

The so-called theft of the creative fire is, according to Enoch, the crime, which caused the guilt of the fallen angels, of whom the Church has made Satan and his Host.

The Abbé Roca tells us again of the “Sat of the Hermetists,” but he commits a double error in attributing that “Sat” to the Hermetists, who had never heard of it, and in calling it “Substance” like the Yliaster of Paracelsus.

Sat is a Sanskrit term, used in the philosophy of the Vedanta; it is an adjective untranslatable into any language; neither substance nor pure Spirit, nor even any thing, Sat is the infinite All, LIFE, or rather ABSOLUTE Existence, which cannot be translated either by the verb “to be” ויה (Eheieh), or by the verb “to live” הדה, of which the Kabbalists have made a glyph of existence by transmuting it in a dozen different ways without the meaning being altered, and applying it to their Jehovah. Sat is the Absolute, or Parabrahm—and where is the

Vedântin who would ever allow himself to call “spirit” Parabrahm, or the neuter Brahma!—while the Yliaster of Paracelsus is only the Anima Mundi; it is not even Mûlaprakriti, which is the “veil of Parabrahm” (literally, the root of Nature) but simply the Âkâśa, the noumenon of the Astral Light, the veil between the Earth and the first waters.

To the ecclesiastical religion of Christianity which has materialized everything, which has carnalized the Logos or Word, and made of the unknown God of St. Paul an anthropomorphic being, our SAT would never be either comprehensible or acceptable; our Sat, of which Ain-Soph, the negative divinity of the Kabbalists, is merely a pale metaphysical copy.

As a Roman Catholic, the Abbé Roca tells us that, “outside of God, there exists in the universe but one and the same substance,” whatever that may be. Disciples of the Mahatmas, the Theosophists answer him: we reject a conditioned and limited God, though he would have outside of himself but one mathematical point! We are not looking for a dwarf-God, a God endowed with human attributes, made in the image of man; above all, we do not want a God fashioned by the mortal architects of a Church which has had the audacity to proclaim itself infallible! The Divinity that we acknowledge, we who hardly dare to formulate an adumbration of its conception, is God-the-ALL, absolute, infinite, without beginning or end; the omnipresent divinity, of which the only WORD that can be “made flesh” is Humanity! And that Word, which corporeal mankind—especially that mankind found under the aegis of the Churches—crucifies constantly and without intermission, that Word is resurrected only in that man who is sufficiently liberated from bonds tied by mortal hands, no longer to make for himself an earthly idol, either of the Church—the statue with feet of clay—

or the world—the Satan who never renounces his pomp and works!

The Christos which Theosophists, thus liberated, have acknowledged, ever since the secula seculorum, is the spiritual Ego, glorious and triumphant over the flesh. But, as the allegory of the Four Evangelists shows, the Son, from his resurrection, ascends to heaven to be forever one with the Father. Does that mean that we should accept the “miracle” of the Ascension as applied to the resurrected body of a man who has been made into a God? Does it mean that a fact so supernatural has ever taken place in the history of mankind? No! We absolutely reject such an interpretation, we reject that dogma which degrades the great mystery of universal Unity,¹ because, as far as we are concerned, we explain it quite differently:

Once united to his Âtman-Christos, the Ego, by that very act, loses the great illusion called ego-ism, and perceives at last the fullness of truth; that Ego knows that it has never lived outside the great All, and that it is inseparable from it. Such is Nirvâna, which, for it, is but the return to its primitive condition or state. Imprisoned in its oubliette² of flesh and matter, it had lost even the conception or memory of that condition, but once the light of Spirit has revealed to it the illusion of the senses, it places no more trust in earthly things, for it has learned to scorn them; the Son is now united to the Father; thenceforth the soul is one with Spirit! And when a man has reached this point in the Gnosis, or Theosophy, what has he then to do with the dogmas of any Church?

As to the Church, it has always made mysteries, and as the Abbé says very correctly, “mysteries exist only for the ignorant”; furthermore, is it not Christ himself who is made by the Catholic Church to say: “. . . that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops” [Luke, xii, 3]. And what is that, but a repetition of the commandment of Gautama the Buddha: “Go and proclaim on the housetops of the pariahs, and in broad daylight, the mysteries of the Brâhmanas which they have kept secret in their temples. They have done so for love of power, for control of the blind, and to usurp the prerogatives of the Devas (Gods).”

What the Brâhmanas were doing when Siddhârtha Buddha came to deliver the people from the yoke of that caste, the Roman Church has done to this very day in the West; Theosophists will bring to light the mysteries of the Catholic Church, which are really those of the Brâhmanas, although under other names; in doing so, they will merely follow the commandments of the two great Mahatmas: Gautama of Kapilavastu and Jesus of Judaea. Both of them had found their “Christos,” the eternal Truth, and both, being Sages and Initiates, proclaimed the same truths. We all thank the Abbé Roca for his brave and generous words; we do not doubt that such priests as he, who have the courage to translate “the dead letter” of the symbolic texts and proclaim the esoteric truths “upon the housetops,” may be ready to follow the way of Truth, the Light which they find on their path.

Honor to such!

But we are not as optimistic, however, as he is. Though the Church sees its greatest “mysteries” unmasked and proclaimed by scholars of every country who are versed in Orientalism and Symbology, or by Theosophists, we cannot believe that it will ever accept

our truths; we believe still less that it will ever confess its errors. And, as on their part, true Theosophists will never accept either a Christ made Flesh, according to the Roman dogma, or an anthropomorphic God, still less a “Shepherd” in the person of a Pope, it is not they who will move towards “the Mountain of Salvation”; they will wait till the Roman Mohammed takes the trouble of starting on the road which leads to Meru.¹ Will that ever take place? I leave that to the reader to judge for himself.

One last word! The Abbé Roca also speaks of the triple meaning canonically accorded to and recognized in the Biblical texts by his Church. But the Gnosis, like the Gupta-Vidyâ (the secret science) has seven keys that open the seven mysteries. When the Roman Church, or its adherents, shall have acknowledged and studied the four keys (or meanings) which they lack, it will be possible to set about prophesying. Until then, let us try, at least, not to kill each other, if it is not really possible for us to love each other. The future is the greatest of the mysteries and those who have, like Prometheus, the gift of seeing into the Future, reveal the coming mysteries but to a small minority. Let us wait for wisdom to come to a greater number.

H. P. Blavatsky.

¹ The sacred mountain, abode of the Devas. — Editor, Le Lotus.

Reply To Madame Blavatsky’s

OBSERVATIONS ON CHRISTIAN ESOTERICISM

[Le Lotus, Paris, Vol. II, No. II, February, 1888, pp. 258-271]

[Translated from the original French as found in Blavatsky: Collected Works Vol. viii, p. 179-193 & 216-237. The following “reply” is very long and we reproduce it in toto not because of interest or relevance, but that there be a complete record of the interchange.]

I.—There are some men whom nothing can discourage and nothing cast down, because they have faith, faith critically examined, scientifically established. I am one of those.

Far from complaining of the “drubbing” I have received under the guise of a hearty reception, and as a testimony of welcome, upon my first appearance in Le Lotus, on the contrary, I am gratified by Madame Blavatsky’s courteous manner and the complete frankness of her language. In my eyes, these are evidences of her sincerity and cordiality, the less equivocal the more forthrightly given. No one would suspect this lady of toadyism with respect to Catholic priests—usually so readily cajoled, and for good reasons, in Ultramontane circles (Ultramundane, some would say), where the religion of Christ has all to lose and nothing to gain. I am indebted, very greatly indebted, to her virile intellect, her Amazonian gait and her unceremonious pen, for presenting at the very outset the burning question of Christ “with a masculine vigor,” as the Editor remarks, and also, “without ambiguity and without partisanship.”

Without partisanship . . . . . hum! We shall see. It may happen as it often does, that partisanship exists without one suspecting it oneself. We deceive ourselves so easily! It is so difficult to rid oneself of all personal interest, and, still more, of all partisanship of school, sect, church, caste, etc.!

It is not then without reason that Jesus Christ said: “Deny yourselves, and do not swear by any Master, so that you may hold only to the pure Truth.” In his own terms, quite as categorical as those of the Mahârâjâs of Benares, our Christ also declared: “There is no religion higher than Truth.” We shall soon see how he expressed himself on this point.

Now Madame Blavatsky, and with her the Chelas and the Theosophists, have taken unto themselves Masters, the Mahâtmas. They make no secret of it, and I do not blame them. From what the Adepts tell us, it would seem that they are ready to offer themselves to the world in their turn as doctors and teachers. That they have many things to teach us, I have not the least doubt. In the article to which my learned interlocutor replies, I have not done otherwise than render my homage to their wisdom. But when, perhaps a little intoxicated by the heady fumes of these encomiums, the Editor of Le Lotus exclaims and tells me by nods and winks, “who loves us, follows us,” I answer: Patience; I should greatly desire to love you at first sight; it would be easy and, moreover, perfectly Christian. I should like to follow you also, but on sure grounds, con pasos contados, and with the knowledge of where I am going.

I find myself rather in the attitude of Aristotle; for me as for him, there is something which is of greater value than Plato, that is Truth. The phrase is well-known: “Amicus Socrates, sed major Veritas”! If then you are Truth, let us have it, but I must have absolute proof.

Before Madame Blavatsky, it happens that another presented himself to the world who said squarely, “I am the TRUTH—Ego sum Veritas”! He also told us: “Come unto me without fear, trust in my words, I am the Master, the unique Master, and the only true Doctor.” And again: “I am the Way, I am the Life, I am the Resurrection.”

That is the language of Christ, and if it did not reveal God Himself, it would betray him as the most shameless of impostors. Now to say in the presence of Madame Blavatsky that Christ is an impostor should be carefully avoided, because she would reply with an outright smack on the mouth of the blasphemer. Draw your own conclusions, then.

You will agree, gentlemen, that the way in which Christ puts the matter is even more daring and more masculine than that of your noble Directress. Here, indeed, one can say it is done “without ambiguity and without partisanship,” without any personal interest of any kind and with perfect renunciation of self. The testimony in favour of it is such that it stares at you and takes complete possession of you. None can be ignorant of the fact that the life of Jesus Christ was spent in multiplying undeniable evidences of his disinterestedness, and that his death was the supreme confirmation of it, the μαρτυρμια τϵκμηριου [evidence of proof]. Hence, overwhelmed by so many

proofs, a very unlikely philosopher, J. J. Rousseau, once cried: “If the life and death of Socrates are those of a sage, the life and death of Jesus are those of a God!” Socrates exemplifies the highest and purest personification of virtue in the West, and I emphasize this because I agree that the East has seen incarnations of Wisdom superior to that which expressed itself in Socrates, and for that reason closer to that which was accomplished nineteen centuries ago in the Son of Mary. You see I am not niggardly over my admiration for India.

Further, it must be observed that Jesus Christ himself declares that it is impossible to show greater devotion to one’s brothers than that exemplified by sacrificing oneself entirely for them: Nemo majorem Charitatem habet quam, etc. When any of the Mahâtmas—Jesus Christ was not one, whatever Madame Blavatsky may think—can convince me that he burns with such a love for us, that he came into the world to prove it and at the same time to bear witness to the Truth, that he himself is in substance this divine Truth, and the Way which leads thereto, and the Life which results from it, and the Resurrection which restores that Truth and that Life to our hearts when they have been extinguished in them; when he shall have demonstrated to me experimentally, as Jesus Christ does every day in my soul, “that he is the unique Master and only true Doctor,” that he is the Light that lightens all men, and the Principle at the base of our understanding—Ego Principium qui loquor vobis; when, moreover, to sustain these witnesses and an infinity of others no less extraordinary, he shall have agreed to drink from the chalice that Jesus drained at Gethsemane (a cup far more bitter than the one from which Socrates in the West drank the hemlock, or that from which Krishna, Gautama of Kapilavastu, Siddhârtha and all the other Buddhas drank the bitterness in the East); when he shall, without complaint or murmur, sicut agnus, have delivered his body, a planta pedis usque ad summum verticis, to the rods and whips of flagellation wielded to the uttermost by the arms of the soldiery and servants, his face to the bruisings, the blows and the spitting of the mob, his head and forehead to the sharp pricking of the crown of thorns, his hands and feet to the nails and hammers of crucifixion, his lips parched by agony to the vinegar and bitterness of the abominable sponge, and, still more grievous, his life, a whole life woven of good deeds and blessings, to the denial of his own disciples, to the insults, the sarcasms, the blasphemies and curses of the priests and pontiffs of his time; when, finally, to all the fury of that diabolical sabbath, to all that outburst of frenzy, of iniquities and atrocious madness, he will reply only with that sublime prayer: “Father, forgive them for they

know not what they do!”. . . . . . Then, oh yes, then! my dear brothers, I will do more than love you; I will follow you blindly, in a dumb adoration, abandoning all to you; as I have abandoned all to my divine Master and Saviour, Jesus Christ. For then He would be you, and you would be but one with the Father; then you would have lost the great illusion that is called Ego-ism, to unite yourselves, like Him, with Âtma-Christos, with the Ego, absolute, eternal, divine; then you would have realized, through the humble and suffering Christ of flesh, the Christ-Spirit, glorious and triumphant, and you would be able to exclaim with our incomparable Paul: “I live, but not so! it is not I who lives, it is Christ who lives in me! Vivo autem, iam non ego: vivit vero in me Christus!”

II.—Ah! Believe me, Madame, the true Christians are not all dead with the last Gnostics, as you mistakenly declare. We have preserved, we also, even the Roman Church, however obscured and fallen it may be at this hour, that profound esotericism which is hidden under exoteric forms and uncomprehended dogmas, and which is found, nevertheless, under all religious symbols and all sacred traditions, in the West as well as in the East. If the sublime conception of that Christian ideal is that of the Mahâtmas, honour to them! But it is also that of the Kabalists and the true Catholics; I wish I could add of all the Theosophists, and of all the Occultists and of all the Hermetists.

Like yourself, Madame, we distinguish between the χρηστός of suffering and the χριστός of glory, and we know that which you appear to be ignorant of, i.e., that the unction refused by you to Jesus Christ has streamed upon him with the blood of his own immolation, because every sacrificed being is a being consecrated or Christified, and he is perfectly annointed who is completely offered in bloody holocaust. Nevertheless, you will agree with this, Madame, in recalling the Cycle of initiation: “No ‘sacrificial victim’,” you say rightly, “could be united to Christ triumphant before passing through the preliminary stage of the suffering Christ who was put to death.” Very good!

It is precisely to fulfil that ritualistic condition that “the Word made itself Flesh” according to St. John, and, consequently, that it becomes able, in our time, after nineteen centuries of crucifixion, to enter fully, before the whole world, into the divine light of the Christ-Spirit, because, as the wise Apostle of the Areopagus teaches, “Christ must suffer in order that he may enter into glory.”—“oportuit Christum pati et it a intrare in gloriam.” The law is absolute,

universal, it applies to Him who is the head, the chief, the “Principium” of mankind, and it applies also to each of the Monads, the cells or individual units of the universal social body of which that Christ is the epigenesic principle. None of us will enter that glorified body, which is to me the beatific Nirvâna of the Buddhists, without traversing that path which the Gospel calls the “strait gate and narrow way, angusta porta, et arcta via” [Matt., vii, 14].

Madame Blavatsky may now see the true meaning of the conversion of St. Paul which she has not understood. St. Paul was an initiate of the Essenian school of Gamaliel, a true Therapeut, a perfect Nazarene, as he tells us himself. He found himself precisely in the condition Madame Blavatsky apparently finds herself today, and where I fear some of the Chelas also are to be found. Like the majority of the Pharisees—which learned sect Paul gloried in following—he acknowledged the glorious Christ, he expected Him, but he did not recognize Him under the appearance of the sorrowful Son of Mary who so little resembled his ideal and that of the Synagogue, with his crown of thorns, his bleeding flesh, with the humiliation of his whole life, with the disconcerting ignominy of his allegedly infamous death.

Upon the road to Damascus it was given to Gamaliel’s disciple to discover his glorious Christ in the very person of the Christ veiled in flesh and suffering, in order to realize in his human body all that was ordained by the Law of Sacrifices, in the Cycle of Initiation of which Madame Blavatsky speaks. What was revealed to Paul was not by any means the Christos of the Gnostics, as she says, but really the Chrestos with all the arcana of his abasement and of his annihilation.

Also, listen to him on his return from Damascus: “I glorify myself not to know among you any other thing but Jesus Christ, and Jesus-Christ crucified.—Nihil me scire glorior inter vos, nisi Jesum-Christum, et hunc crucifixum.”

Then, let us say in passing, the Apostle would have taken good care not “to make one mouthful of Saint Peter” as Madame Blavatsky says, because, long before Paul, Peter had deciphered the Arcana of the Passion, and he knew perfectly well that behind the bleeding Christ was hidden, in a kind of chrysalis, the Christ-Spirit, glorious and divine. The proof of this is in the Gospel itself. “What think ye of me?” Christ once asked his disciples. Peter alone answered: “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” “Credo quia tu es Christus,

Filius Dei vivi”—“Thou art happy, Simon-Bar-Jona, because thou sayest what has not been revealed to thy spirit by any man, but by the Father only.” Would that Madame Blavatsky could go to Damascus, and on her journey meet what Paul encountered there! In order to become a perfect initiate and the greatest of Christian Buddhists, that alone is lacking.

I do not deny that she is better versed in Hindû esotericism than I; but I doubt, after having given it careful consideration, that she is as well acquainted as I am with the Gospel esotericism. This is the reason, due entirely to her, why it is difficult to find ourselves in instant accord. I know Buddhism well enough to understand her easily; she does not know Christianity sufficiently well to readily catch my meaning.

Otherwise, would she have dreamed of displaying so much erudition before me, and to remind me of the astronomical allegory and the sidereal symbolism, in which the priests of the ancient temples saw stereotyped in some fashion all the mysteries of Christianity? It is long since Dr. Sepp, to refute Strauss and Dupuis, replied victoriously to the arguments brought against the historic Christ which were drawn from that astral legend. Thus, as that profound exegete remarks, Nature, the real dumb Sibyl, is so full of the Word which informs her that she delivers her oracles and unveils her secrets by means of all the Cosmic manifestations which occur in the subjects treated upon in our sciences; “multifariam, multisque modis loquens nobis, etc.”

To answer Madame Blavatsky on this point, I ought to do some plagiarizing, for I know nothing more definitive than what is written in the Introduction to Dr. Sepp’s splendid Life of Christ, translated into French by M. Charles Sainte-Foi (a pseudonym of Éloi Jourdain).

I ask pardon of Madame Blavatsky and her readers for referring her and them to that fine monument of our Gnosis.

I have such faith in the progress of critical science that I never despair of anyone—still more of the high intelligences I am addressing at this moment.

Let us be content at present with the valuable declaration made by Madame Blavatsky, which is in agreement with her Masters, the Mahâtmas, namely, that behind the dogmatic formulas and

sacramental veils of all the exoteric religions there is a supreme, absolute truth, an essentially divine Christianity, however diversely interpreted, and almost everywhere exploited. This alone is enough greatly to astonish our scholars, and especially to make our Church establishments as well as our Academies reflect! Let them work hard with their mattocks everywhere, for the bread of science demands even more sweat than material bread.

Yes, Priests, yes, scholars, one and the same Dogma is common to the East and to the West. “Theosophists,” says Madame Blavatsky, “will bring to light the mysteries of the Catholic Church, which are really those of the Brâhmanas, although under other names.” So may it be! My first article said enough of how I share in that hope, and this one does not contradict it.

III.—When Christ’s suffering will have finished the redeeming and liberating work he came to do for us, and which appears to me to be nearing its end; when, thanks to Christian civilization and to the new sciences which are being inaugurated among us, when, I say, by favour of all these illuminations, the humble and suffering Christ “shall have been sufficiently exalted” in the understanding of the people redeemed by his blood, then, according to his own words, “he will draw all to him, he will bear them to his Father and our Father, to his God and our God,” and in that ascension he will encompass the whole world: Cum exaltatus fuero, omnia traham ad meipsum—ascendo ad Deum meum et Deum vestrum, ad Patrem meum et Patrem vestrum.”

Need we comment on this text? As you can see, it would be but to paraphrase the Law of Initiation, such as was formerly practised in the secrecy of the Temples, and such, I believe, as the Mahâtmas and Chelas still practice in their profound and holy retreats. When, by the purifying road of suffering, of expiation, and of death, Christ will be transfigured in the social structure, as he was once personally seen to be upon prophetic Tabor, to the extent that the sorrowful Christ will have become the triumphant Christ, through the sacrifice made to the absolute Ego of all that constitutes the relative Ego or Ego-ism, then, in truth, Son of God as He is from all Eternity, as the Word, equal to and consubstantial with the Father, according to the canonical Nicean expression, he will be recognized, acclaimed, glorified by the East as well as the West; then all the sanctuaries will again re-echo his call, the “general” salute on the drums will again be beaten, and the réveille of his Advent will sound from one end of the earth to the other.

Humanity, overthrowing the barriers which shut in and sectarianize the churches, will travel freely and peacefully toward the promised Sheepfold to constitute a universal family of the Father, under the unique Shepherd’s crook of a Shepherd who will be Christ Himself, visibly personified in a Pontiff who will no more resemble the Pope of today, than the Pope of Salt Lake resembles the real Pope of the Vatican.

Is what I say a prophecy? Not on your life. I am only repeating the Oracles, and what the words of the Messiah and St. Paul report. I am, at the most, a wretched phonograph repeating what is whispered to me from everywhere.

While waiting for these prophesies to be realized, believe me, do not be too greatly disturbed, do not be so dreadfully shocked, Madame, at the humility of our Christ! A great mystery, which is no longer one for many initiates, is hidden under his mortifications. Consider now!

In order to assume human nature, and thereby everyday human-hood, with all its individual monads, transitory and ceaselessly renewed on the earthly journey, Christ had to take on himself, in his flesh, all our wounds, all our miseries, all our personal and social infirmities, and to expiate them upon a cross in the streams of a virginal blood, absolutely pure in the Father’s sight. To raise this fallen world, sunk lower in the West than in the East—and that is why the earth’s axis is inclined, as you know—a lever was necessary. That lever, far more powerful than the one Archimedes asked for, is the arm of Christ, that arm which we call “the invincible right of the Father.”

Under such a process Europe is evolving, is being morally uplifted; it awakens, it thrills, do you not see it? It grows, it mounts, soon it is going to find itself at the heights where Asia stands awaiting it. The Mahâtmas, their gaze fixed on us, have seen this ascensional movement operating in the turmoil of our revolutions, and they are saying to themselves: This is the psychological moment, let us hold out a hand to our poor brothers, and light our beacons in the midst of their darkness. And that is why, obeying the mot-d’ordre of the “Brothers,” you have been able to establish 135 branches, which are so many centres of light, not only in Paris, but already in nearly every quarter of the globe. And when, by this means, the East and the West will have met each other and embraced, then, Arcades ambo, they will together take their glorious flight toward the Kingdom of Heaven

realized on earth, and the divine Jerusalem contemplated by the Seer of Patmos will descend among us, to be occupied by men who will be as Gods, and by Gods who will be as men, even according to the saying of our Christ: Ego dixi; vos Dii estis!

I am perfectly convinced that if, in my first article, I had been able to give my thoughts their full development—it really calls for a book, and that book will appear, as I am writing it—Madame Blavatsky would not imagine that I invited her and the Adepts to repair to the “Mountain of Salvation” by simply taking the road to Caesaro-Papal Rome, “where still the Satan of the Seven Hills reigns,” to speak like Saint-Yves. She would have understood, on the contrary, that “we shall all have to take the trouble of travelling at the same pace on the route which leads to Meru.”

This religious synthesis, and the social harmony and divine felicity which will result therefrom, will not be here on earth so soon, she says: “We are but at the beginning of Kali-Yuga, of which 5,000 years have not yet elapsed while its full duration is 4,320 centuries and it will only be at the end of the Cycle that the Kalkî-Avatâra will come.” I do not deny that. Alas! I even believe she is right; I am not competent to judge in the matter. But, well-founded or not, those calculations are not going to contradict what she calls my “optimistic hope.”

As for me, I have simply wished to speak of the epoch when, thanks to the progress accomplished among us by religious economy, and the Christian civilization that we owe to the diffusion of the entirely new Spirit of our Holy Gospel, it will become possible to overthrow these obstacles, I mean the mountains of error, of prejudices and passions, which have hitherto prevented the East and the West appreciating and listening to each other. These obstacles, these barriers, as everyone understands today, are the political work of Caesar. All our misfortunes come to us from that monster, who is the Satan of whom our Parables speak. Witness Jesus Himself on that point.

But first, I must remind you of the cry of triumph that, like a clarion cry of the morning watchman, echoed four years ago in the centre of Paris: “In the twentieth century war will be dead, frontiers will be dead, armies will be dead, Caesars will be dead” and the rest. An immense multitude, assembled at the Château-d’Eau, quivered with enthusiasm under the fiery breath of that prophetic Word, and the echoes sent that emotion far and wide. Shall it be said that Victor

Hugo, whose genius was above all made of presentiments and foresight, shall it be said that Paris, France, Europe—Christendom from one end to the other—is nourished on illusions and flatters itself with optimistic dreams? Oh! yes, yes, what is stirring in the entire West and in the whole of America is really the spirit of Christ, you may be sure! Christendom does not realize itself unless it comprehends that it belongs to Christ. “Mens agitat molem.” Its Redeemer possessed it, and St. Paul would be socially right in our times: “Non estis vestri, vos estis Christi.” O people, Christ holds you! Upon the Keep of Vincennes, the Pythoness spoke truly when, a hundred and ten years ago, she flung the blazing words to the world by the mouth of Diderot, prisoner of State: “Deus, ecce Deus!” “Arise, ye peoples, Deliverance is near!”

Do you see, Dear Madame, if one wishes to do justice to the system of our Redemption and the genius of its Founder, one must do two things: first, “not make a question of principles or doctrines into a question of persons or ecclesiastical establishments,” as one of your brilliant compatriots, Madame Svetchine, said; the Roman Church may no longer find itself at the height of the Holy Gospel, but the Gospel itself has lost nothing of its scientific, religious, and social value, for all that; it may be that the Christian priesthood has fallen, greatly fallen; but its decadence in no way involves that of Catholicism. It would be well to read Rosmini-Serbati in this connection! In the second place, we must bear in mind the deplorable state of the West when our Messiah came to open the Era of our Redemption, at once religious, social, economic, and political.

But who can tell the frightful ravages working in the popular understanding and in the heart of the Roman world, through the Satanic influence of the Caesarian idea which has ploughed it up for so many centuries? Who can narrate the vices inoculated into Europe by the abominable system of “might makes right” (tyrannizing and brutalizing the peoples, everywhere tied to the soil and riveted by the fetters of more than one kind of slavery), and which were at the heart of all the intellectual, moral and corporeal miseries everywhere, “erantes et jacentes sicut oves non habentes pastorem,” as Jesus Christ said.

Although Cain, Irshu, Nimrod, those true fathers of Caesarism, were of Asiatic origin, it was not, however, upon the extreme East but upon the West that the calamities, let loose by those great villains, by those first schismatics from the divine and social Law which had governed all mankind until they arrived, precipitated

themselves. The Oriental peoples saw that whirlwind of evils quickly decline toward the horizon and direct its course toward those distant shores which are enclosed by our mountains and seas.

Hence it was that some Fathers of the Church remark that Christ, dying on the cross at the extreme limit which separates the West from the East, held his face turned, his eyes open, and his arms extended toward the West. It is to be observed that the statutes of the Law of Ram were not broken then and are not entirely so even yet in Asia, while among us there remains no trace of them, since Julius Caesar stifled the last survivor of it in Druidic Gaul. If rightly understood, we should perhaps notice that the great law of the Abramid temples is exactly that of which the Redeemer spoke: “I am not come to destroy it but to raise it up, to fulfill it” throughout the whole world—Non veni solvere, sed adimplere! [Matt., v, 17].

Madame Blavatsky is too well initiated into the secrets of the primitive sanctuaries to be ignorant, that, long before Jesus Christ, the Hindû peoples had already passed through the social stages which our Messiah came to lead us through in our turn, in order to re-establish the equilibrium between these two great divisions of the human family, so long disrupted. She knows that, before this rupture, the entire world, as witnessed by Moses, had one sole and identical religious language, one sole and identical social constitution: “Erat terra labii unius, et sermonum eorundem” [Gen., xi, 1].

I am going to say something which not all of my brethren in the priesthood will understand, and that the more illiterate will probably condemn: “The East already had Messiahs and Christs, humanly realized, when the West had only received, through the ministry of Moses and the Prophets, distant promises of its religious and social Redemption.”

It is said that “the Jews, thanks to the Legislator of Sinai, found themselves economically at the level of India, when our Messiah came.” That is possible, even probable; but what cannot be doubted is that the Western peoples, ruined by Roman Caesarism, were in a very backward state. Also, notice that while our social evolution, our religious Redemption, and our economic revival will continue, the Jews, the Hindûs, and the Chinese will remain stationary, or if they move at all it will not be forward. They will wait; they are still waiting. And what are they waiting for? I believe I do not deceive myself; they are waiting until we are in a condition to step out at the same pace as themselves; when the hour will strike

to resume the march forward toward the Paradesa of Ram to which we shall return with them, hands clasped, with the same triumphant song.

And it is in this way that is explained in my mind the failure of the Christian preachings outside the particular sphere that the earliest priesthood of our Church had to evangelize: “preach first the Gospel to the scattered sheep of the house of Israel,” or of Ram (the family of Israel belongs to the Abramite stock and the primitive spelling of Abraham is Abram, i.e., Ab-Ram, issue of Ram). Madame Blavatsky enjoys holding Christ and our Church accountable for the impotence of our efforts in the East. She takes that set back as a defeat of Christianity, while, on the contrary, it is the confirmation of the Messianic plan when regarded in its true meaning. With statistics in hand, invoking and confirming the testimony of the venerable Bishop Temple, she observes that “since the beginning of our century, where the Christian missionaries have made but three million converts, the Mohammedans have acquired two million proselytes without the cost of one cent.” “A sign of the times!” she exclaims.

Oh, yes! a sign of the times, if one knows how to understand it, an evident sign that our religious economy is peculiar to the West and had but little to do in the East under the preliminary form of our Christian Churches. But wait! Lay aside the idea that it has provided a course of redemption for all the peoples who were ruined and martyred by the Caesarian brigandage. You will see later! You will see how it will spin, that top—our globe—in its entirety, under the whip of the glorious Christ.

I could add a large number of observations to the foregoing. I omit here four large pages in the draft that I am transcribing, but I am not closing yet. Let me run through a few points with meticulous care because the ground of argument is going to become a burning question.

So long as the work of the Redemption remains with us, the Holy Gospel of the Deliverance will not depart from our Latin, Greek, Protestant, Anglican, Anglo-Saxon, and Anglo-American churches; but when, according to the promise of the Liberator, Christianity will have overthrown and annihilated Caesarism in all its political forms, great things will be seen!¹

¹ [The Editor of Le Lotus, as is fully explained on the first page, is not responsible for the opinions of contributors. We would draw the attention of censors in countries where Le Lotus goes, that this is a controversial subject, but that we ourselves, do not take part in politics. — Editor, Le Lotus.]

I have promised to let you hear the voice of Christ; this is your opportunity, so listen: “The principle of brutal and criminal force will be driven from the earth.” In other words, which are those of the Gospel: “Princeps huius mundi ejicietur foras!” Satan-Caesar will flee from every quarter, his strongholds will be razed, his structures destroyed, his laws abolished. “I have conquered that abominable world: ego vici mundum!” All economic, religious or social establishments not made by my heavenly Father, and whose foundations are not sunk in justice and divine verities, will be uprooted, utterly extirpated: Omnis plantatio, quam non plantavit Pater meus coelestis, eradicabitur! From that day, the judgment is given, and the crisis begins: “Nunc judicium est mundi, νυ̑ν κρίσις έστὶ του̑ κόσμου τούτου.”

Had I space enough at my disposal, I would not merely quote five or ten or a hundred texts. Evoking the Prophets, Christ, and his Apostles, and the Fathers of the primitive church and the entire Carmelite and Franciscan tradition, I would fill a book with their lightning and thunder. However, that would only be repeating what I have already published in La Fin de l’Ancien Monde (The End of the Ancient World) and one should not quote oneself.

If the priests knew how esoterically to read the dismal parables and funereal prophecies in our Gospel which relate to the end of the world and the consummation of the cycle; if they knew how to understand the symbolism of those mountains that fall, the globe which trembles, the sun which turns black as a coalsack, the moon which no longer reflects light, those constellations which are extinguished, those stars which fall, those trumpets which sound under the breath of Angels, those foundations which are split open, that last judgment which will separate the goats from the sheep . . . they would see that these prodigies are already three-quarters realized, no doubt, in forms unexpected by the Vatican and in our sacristies, but none the less the exact fulfilment of the transcendental promises of our divine Liberator. They would also understand that the world and the age spoken of by Jesus Christ were not what our poor exegetes have imagined, but really the world and the age of the infamous Caesar and his abominable policy; a world and an age for which Jesus refused to pray—non pro mundo rogo!—for the very

simple reason that he came to destroy them; a world and an age, finally, which are none other than those of which John on the one hand, and Tacitus on the other, spoke frankly: Totus mundus in maligno positus est—corrumpere et corrumpi soeculum est.

Permit me to inquire of Madame Blavatsky, in view of the general shake-up of social disintegration, of political decomposition and ecclesiastical divisions, to which old Europe as a whole is reduced in our time (and above all France, precisely because it is the eldest daughter and the Soldier of Christ), if she still thinks that my “hope is optimistic” and that Victor Hugo was under an illusion when he said, “in the Twentieth Century all that will be ended.” Does she believe that the destruction of the rotten structure could yet, for a long time, be conjured away by the desperate efforts of him she calls—she herself—the Mohammed of the West, the more because he has an understanding with “the man of iron” whom he has lately decorated with the title of the Chevalier of Christ, to the great amazement of all Catholics?

I repeat, I believe the hour is near, very near.

Caesar, that is the obstacle, that is the enemy! Once that monster is overthrown all will be changed. I do not wish to say that one bugle call will suffice to collect all peoples under the crook of the One Shepherd. But at least the way will be open, the West and the East will march together under the conduct of the same Christ-Spirit, and, vive Dieu, we shall indeed finish by re-entering the Paradise! The future is ours, thanks to the wise strategy of our Redeemer, and thanks to the sufferings of the Chrestos.

Humanity has a fabulous destiny before it. We would not be understood, neither you, Madame, nor I, if we revealed that glorious future now.

Madame Blavatsky contradicts me far less than she thinks she does. I withdraw the words Yliaster and Sat which she does not allow, in order to propose that of telesme which was employed by Hermes-Trismegistus. Will she accept that? I doubt it. The fact is, there is no expression in our poor language to denote what I wish to say; but she certainly must have understood me, and that is enough.

Outside or beyond God, she accepts nothing, absolutely nothing, not even a mathematical point. She is right. However if one is not a pantheist—and Madame Blavatsky is no more that than I am

—one must express oneself in such a way that our readers will not take us for such. To be better understood, let us say, then, that God is immanent in the Cosmos, present through all and in all, but distinct from all. Are you satisfied, Madame? Yes, indeed? Well, so am I.

But, really, I do not understand how she can tease me about the triple meaning that we canonically recognize in our Holy Scriptures. The Gnosis, she says, in agreement with the Gupta-Vidyâ, provides seven keys, and not merely three, to open the seven mysteries. Is Madame Blavatsky ignorant of the fact that the Christian Doctrine is essentially ternary in all points in which the Buddhist teaching is septenary? This is not to say that we do not appreciate the real basis of the Oriental system any more than you could misunderstand the real foundation of the Western system. We have simplified and summed up your theory without distorting it. Our three keys are equivalent to your seven and include them, as your seven are equivalent to our three which they subdivide.

Everyone knows that the white ray is decomposed into three principal colours which, themselves composite, produce, by a new decomposition, the seven colours of the rainbow. Similarly, analyzing the human being, St. Paul, the true father of our sacred science, describes in him three chief elements which he calls spirit, soul, and body: “integer spiritus et anima et corpus”; the Buddhists, being able to analyze man still further, discovered seven principles in him. There is no contradiction in that; you are right and we also: your seven are our three and our three are your seven. Such is our dogma, appropriate to our intellect and our mental categories, less subtle and less penetrating than yours, but also simpler because more rudimentary. We confess and adore in God a unique essence, proceeding in three distinct persons, in three diverse principles of action, and energizing the creature by seven operations which we call the seven manifestations or the seven gifts of the Paraclete. There is in all this something which recalls the seven distinct states of your prajñâ, which answer in their turn to the seven modifications of matter, and to the seven forms or seven classes of the phenomena of force.

I like to believe, Madame, that the better we understand one another, the better we shall appreciate one another, and, who knows, God willing, maybe do some good to the poor of the West and to the poor of the East also, for, as you know even better than I do, the poor are not lacking there, even in places not far from the Mahatmas.

Abbé Roca, Honorary Canon.

Reply

TO THE MISTAKEN CONCEPTIONS OF THE ABBÉ ROCA CONCERNING MY OBSERVATIONS ON CHRISTIAN ESOTERICISM

H. P. Blavatsky

[Le Lotus. Paris, Vol. II, No. 13, April, 1888, pp. 3-19]

In the February issue of Le Lotus, the Abbé speaks of a “drubbing” [bourrade] which he believes he received from me. At the same time, with a meekness which I will not call Christian—because the Christians are neither humble nor gentle in their polemics—but certainly Buddhistic, my interlocutor assures me that he bears me no ill-will. On the contrary, he says he is gratified by “my courteous manner and the complete frankness of my language,” quite natural results of my “Amazonian gait.”

A more cavilling mind than mine could find something to say to that. It would point out, perhaps, that such a superabundance of adjectives and personal epithets, in reply to observations on a subject as abstract as religious metaphysics, denotes quite the opposite of satisfaction. But Theosophists are but seldom flattered by their critics, and I myself have often received compliments more ill-turned than those the Abbé Roca lavishes on me. I should be wrong, therefore, not to appreciate his courtesy, especially since in his touching solicitude in considering my personality, and in order to do justice to my “virile intellect” and to my “masculine vigour,” the Abbé has consigned the theological Christ to the background and has not breathed a word about the esoteric Christ.

Now, as I have nothing to say of the first, and as I deny in toto the Christ invented by the Church, as well as

all the doctrines, all the interpretations, and all the dogmas, ancient and modern, concerning that personage, I begin by declaring the Reply of the Abbé to my “Notes on Christian Esotericism” to be no answer at all. I do not find, in all his voluminous letter, one single expression that would seriously contradict my objections, by refuting them logically and scientifically. Faith—and above all blind faith—cannot be “critically discussed”; in any case it can never be “scientifically established,” even though the Christian reader may be well satisfied with such casuistry. My interlocutor even bears me a grudge for having “displayed” what he pleases to call “such erudition.” That goes without saying. Against historical and valid arguments, he can offer as an objection only one single fact as “experimental” proof: Jesus Christ unceasingly telling him in his soul “that he is the Unique Master and the only true Doctor.” A feeble proof, indeed, in the face of science, law, and even the common sense of an unbeliever!

It is obvious that the famous paradox of Tertullian: “Credo quia absurdum et impossibile est”¹ has nothing to do with a discussion of this kind. I thought I was addressing myself to the erudite mystic, to the socialistic and liberal Abbé Roca. Have I disturbed myself merely for a priest, a fidei Defensor! The Abbé gets out of it by saying: “I know Buddhism well enough to understand her [me] easily; she does not know Christianity sufficiently well to readily catch my meaning.” Grieved as I am to contradict him, truth must nevertheless come before all else. The Abbé deceives himself in fancying he understands Buddhism; it is easy to see that he does not know it even exoterically, any more than Hinduism, even in its popular form. Otherwise would he have ever placed

¹ [“It is true because it is impossible.”]

Krishna, as he does on page 3, among the Buddhas? Or again, would he have confused the name of a historical personage, Prince Gautama, with his mystical titles, enumerating them as so many Buddhas?

Does he not write, indeed, in speaking of Jesus, that the chalice from which he drank was “far more bitter than the cup from which Socrates in the West drank the hemlock, or that . . . . which Krishna, Śâkyamuni,¹ Gautama of Kapilavastu, Siddhârtha, and all the other Buddhas’’ had drained? This “and all the other Buddhas” is a definite proof for us that the Abbé not only knows nothing of esoteric Buddhism, but has not the slightest idea of even the simple historical and popular biography of the great Hindu reformer. This is exactly as if, in speaking of Jesus, I should write: “Orpheus, the Son of Mary, Emmanuel, the Saviour, the Nazarene, and all the other Christs who have been crucified.” Without further wasting time in pointing out a number of lapsus linguae relating to Sanskrit, Brâhmanical and Buddhist terms scattered throughout the articles of the Abbé Roca—otherwise very learned articles and certainly very eloquent in style—that example is sufficient to permit the public to judge if my critic knows the first word of Buddhism. In the present discussion, can it be that the Abbé confounds it, as so many others have done, with Theosophy? In that case I may be allowed to inform him that Theosophy is neither Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Mohammedanism, Hinduism, or any other ism: it is the esoteric synthesis of the known religions and philosophies.

¹ This title, thanks to the kindness of Monsieur Gaboriau, did not appear at all with the others in Le Lotus, but I have the first proofs where it is found in the order indicated above.

Surely I must know something of Christianity—the popular and especially the exoteric—to allow myself to enter the lists against so erudite a Catholic priest as my adversary. Should one not say rather (admitting for the moment that I have not been able “to catch at once” the Christianity of the Abbé Roca) that my esteemed interlocutor is not too well aware of what he preaches? That, having thrown to the windmills his cap of an orthodox and papistical ecclesiastic, ignoring the true esotericism of the Brâhmanas and the Buddhists, of the Pagan and Christian Gnostics, as well as of the authentic Chaldean Kabalah, and knowing nothing of the doctrines of the Theosophists, he has fabricated for himself a Christianity of his own, an Esotericism sui generis? I confess that I do not understand him.

Of his “Law of Ram” and his “Ab-Ram, issue of Ram”(?)—I know nothing. I know perfectly well the VAMŚÂVALI or genealogy of the Sûrya and the Chandra races¹ from Ikshvâku and Budha² to Râma and Krishna, the common source whence the Purânas (ancient Scriptures), the Bhâgavata, the Skanda, the Agni and the Bhavishya-Purâna, have drawn their divine, human, and dynastic genealogies. A copy of it is to be found in the royal library of the Mahârâjâs of Udaipur (the most ancient of the Indian royal houses, whose family genealogy has been examined and sanctioned by the Anglo-Indian government). Râma is a historical personage. The ruins of cities built by him and buried under several successive strata of other cities, more

¹ Sûrya and Chandra (Solar and Lunar) are terms used respectively for the two great primitive and radical races of Âryâvarta, called the Solar and Lunar Races.

² I hope the reader will avoid confounding Budha (with one d) the son of Soma, the Moon, with the mystical title of Buddha (two ds). The one is the proper name of an individual (Budha, Intelligence or Wisdom), the other is the title of the Sages, the “Illuminated.”

recent but still prehistoric, still exist in India; they are known as well as the ancient coins with his effigy and name. What then is this “Ab-Ram, issue of Ram”?¹ A-bram or A-brahm, in Sanskrit, means a non-Brâhmana, hence a man driven out from the Brahmin caste, or a man of inferior caste. Abra is the name of Indra’s elephant; its female is called Abramu. The words are Sanskrit, and the name Abramu is found again in Chaldea, but the Abraham of the Jews has nothing to do with the Hindu Râma;² he cannot have issued from the latter, for it is Râma, on the contrary, who has issued from Brahman (neuter) through his terrestrial aspect, Vishnu, of which he is the Avatara.³

This is simply a digression which the Abbé may perhaps call another “thrashing” [bourrade]. A propos of this, I would say he must be very thin-skinned, as I do not see, in my “Notes on Christian Esotericism,” anything that could have given rise to such an idea in the imagination of my honorable interlocutor. The puff of wind which knocks down a house of cards may easily pass for a heavy squall in the eyes of the architect who built it; but if the Abbé Roca lays the blame on the puff, rather than on the weakness of his edifice, it is certainly not my fault. He also accuses me of partisanship; that is an accusation as unjust as the other. As I am neither a priest nor under the ferocious rod of a Church which declares itself infallible, I, myself am ready to accept the

¹ It is not the tribes of the proud Râjputs of the Solar race, Sûryavamśa—tribes which historically prove their descent from Lava and Kuśa, the two sons of Râma—who would acknowledge this unknown “Ab-Ram.” See my note No. I on Abraham in a forthcoming number of Le Lotus.

² Ab, Aba means "father," but only in the Semitic tongues.

³ We must draw the reader's attention, in passing, to the importance of these remarks, because the works of Fabre d’Olivet and Saint-Yves d’Alveydre are based upon data completely out of harmony with them. — Editor, Le Lotus.

truth from whence it comes. My critic, less fortunate than myself, finding himself between the hammer and the anvil, cannot accept my conclusions, and forthwith tries to attribute them to my “partisanship,” and my “ignorance” of his religion. Once again, the spirit of partisanship cannot exist in a Society as universal and impartial as ours, which has chosen for its motto “There is no religion higher than Truth.” Our Masters being Sages far too great to bedizen themselves with the peacock’s feathers of infallibility or even to boast of the possession of absolute Truth, their disciples always keep an open mind to facts which can be demonstrated to them. Let the Abbé demolish the proofs we offer against the existence of a carnalized Christ, hence Christ-Man, whether called Jesus or Krishna; let him demonstrate that there has never been any other incarnated God than his “Jesus-Christ,” and that this one is the “only” as well as the “greatest” of the Masters and Doctors—not only the greatest of the Mahâtmans but God in person! Very good; then let him give us proofs, irrefutable or at least as logical and evident as those advanced by us. But he must not come offering as proof the voice which speaks in his soul, or quotations drawn from the Gospels. Because his voice—were it even the twin-sister of that of the daïmôn of Socrates—has no more value in the discussion, for us or for the public, than has for him or for any other person, the voice which tells me to the contrary in my soul. Yes, he is right in saying that “it is so difficult to rid oneself of all personal interest, and, still more, of all partisanship of school, sect, church, caste”; as that sentence could in no way apply to me, for I do not hold to any special school nor belong to any sect, Church or caste, since I am a Theosophist, would it not apply to him, Christian, Catholic, Ecclesiastic and Canon?

In general, our esteemed correspondent must have a rather lively imagination. For now he imagines the Editor of Le Lotus “intoxicated by the heady fumes” of his eulogies of the knowledge of the Mahâtmans and “nodding and winking” at him. If so, the Editor must be “melancholy in his cups” since, instead of thanking him for his flattering advances (flattering, according to him), the Editor sends the Abbé’s first article to me in London, so that I may answer it, and follows it by my “thrashing.” Our facts and intentions do not agree with the ideas the Abbé Roca has of them. It is true that he has warned his readers that “no one would suspect this lady [his humble servant] of toadyism in respect to Catholic priests.” That is an incontestable and historical fact; it is indeed the only one I find in his long epistle. If, having the experience of a long life passed in studying the above-mentioned priests, I have put an extinguisher on the rosy hopes which shone in the flame of his first letter, it is because I could not take seriously the simple compliments of civility addressed to the pagan Mahâtmans by a Christian and a French Abbé, and because, even if the Editor of the French Lotus could be deceived, the Editor of the English Lucifer had seen through them.¹ While sincerely appreciating the Abbé Roca as a writer, and while in my thoughts distinguishing the mystical philosopher from the priest, I cannot, however, lose sight of his cassock. So the homage he renders to the wisdom of our Masters, instead of intoxicating me by its heady fumes, immediately appeared to me under its true guise. This homage plays

¹ We hardly dare claim we catch Madame Blavatsky’s idea, but we believe that in the present case we have not been deceived. We have generously offered the Abbé Roca a forum; in this he has expressed his ideas which Madame Blavatsky refutes with a masterly hand; other writers express and will express their own ideas herein, because the object of Le Lotus is to instruct its readers, by giving from time to time the opinions of eminent minds who may differ from us on some points. — Editor, Le Lotus.

the part of a greasy pole erected to serve as a support for Christian gewgaws attached to it in profusion, by an apostolic and Roman hand, or of a Hindu-Theosophic doll bedecked with Popish amulets.¹ Far from being intoxicated—I confess with my usual “frankness” and my unambiguous rudeness—I feel but a redoubled mistrust.

The misconceptions with which the Abbé’s Reply abounds prove how right I was. Did he expect the Editor of Le Lotus and the Theosophists to cry out in chorus: Mea culpa! and be converted en masse to his ideas? We see him, after the first reply from them, parrying imaginary blows, and, in a second letter, giving an entirely different colour to the compliments of his first article. He certainly has the right to do this; better than anyone else he must know the real meaning of his own thoughts. But this applies to everyone, I believe. Why then does he proceed to disfigure what I say, and even to invent impossible scenes and cases where he makes me play a strange part, and attributes to me words that he certainly did not find in my “Notes” written in answer to his December article? The fundamental idea of my observations was in fact that he who would say “Ego sum Veritas” is yet to be born; that the “Vos Dii estis” applies to all, and that every man born of woman is “the son of God,” whether he be good, bad, or neither the one nor the other. Either the Abbé Roca is obstinately determined not to understand me, or he has an ulterior purpose. I do not at all object to his mistaking the thundering voice of his Latin Church for the one he thinks he hears in the depth of his soul, but I do most emphatically object to his

¹ Madame Blavatsky judges according to the spirit and the terms of the article under consideration. We happen to know that the Abbé Roca is eloquently fulminating against Leo XIII, but the latter, stricken with an incurable deafness, cannot hear him. Moreover, one cannot wake the dead, and it is better to leave them alone, in order to occupy oneself with the living. — Editor, Le Lotus.

representing me as sharing the dogmas which have been thus inculcated in him, when in reality I repudiate them completely.

Judge for yourself. I write in every letter that a divine Christ (or Christos) has never existed under a human form outside the imagination of blasphemers who have carnalized a universal and entirely impersonal principle. I venture to believe that this is perfectly clear. Well, the Abbé Roca, after having represented me as saying “I am the Truth”—an absurdity I leave to the Churches who discovered it, and at which an Adept, a Sage, would smile in pity—allows himself to make the following assertion:

. . . . . it happens that another presented himself to the world who said squarely, “I am the TRUTH—Ego sum Veritas”! . . . . That is the language of Christ, and if it did not reveal God Himself, it would betray him as the most shameless of impostors. Now to say in the presence of Madame Blavatsky that Christ is an impostor should be carefully avoided, because she would reply with an outright smack on the mouth of the blasphemer. Draw your own conclusions then. . . .

Draw your own conclusions!!!. . .

What conclusions may or may not be drawn by others interests me very little. But I will draw my own conclusions, for, I believe, I understand.

There are two possibilities:

1. Either the Abbe has no clear idea of what Theosophy is, of its real doctrines, or of myself, the humble disciple of Truth, and speaks to the winds and at random;

1. Or he wants to corner me, to force me to explain myself, so as to get a categorical answer from me.

The reasoning would not be bad. Either Madame Blavatsky will pass in silence that assertion which is as extraordinary as it is false—silence means consent or she will reply by contradicting and denying it; in the latter case she will make fresh enemies among the Christians, and that would be so much gained.

Is that so, Monsieur l’Abbé? Then it is just one more miscalculation. The “amazon” will have this time, as well as on other occasions, enough “masculine vigour” to reply without ambiguity and in the very face of the universe, what she thinks of your little arrangement. In fact, to say that Christ (we say Christos) is an impostor would be to proffer, not a blasphemy, but a simple stupidity: a personal adjective cannot be applied to an ideal principle, to an abstraction; it would be like saying: “Infinite Space is a devotee.” An Occultist-Theosophist would laugh. As to the supposition that I am capable of replying “with an outright smack” on the mouth of the one who would proffer the expression, that is still more grotesque. The Abbé forgets that I am first of all a Theosophist, and is probably ignorant that I am personally a disciple of the Buddhist philosophy. Now a true Buddhist would not even strike a dog to stop him from barking. The Buddhists practice all the virtues preached in the “Sermon on the Mount” of Gayâ—on the Mount of Galilee six centuries later—virtues which are heard of but rarely in the churches of the Christian countries, and that are practised still less frequently. The Buddhists do not resist, they do not return evil for evil; they leave the glory of smacking, of cutting off the ears of their adversaries, to those like saint Peter who in that way defend their Master, only to betray and deny him two hours later, according to the sad story. Does the Abbé

wish to know, without ambiguity, what I really think of the Christian legend? It is easy for me to satisfy him.

For me Jesus Christ, i.e., the Man-God of the Christians, copied from the Avatâras of every country, from the Hindu Krishna as well as the Egyptian Horus, was never a historical person. He is a deified personification of the glorified type of the great Hierophants of the Temples,¹ and his story, as told in the New Testament, is an allegory, assuredly containing profound esoteric truths, but still an allegory. It is interpreted by the help of the seven keys, similarly to the Pentateuch. This theory of the seven keys, the Church, according to the Abbé Roca, has simplified “without disfiguring it,” reducing the keys to three; while, on the contrary, it has fabricated three false keys which do not open anything. The legend of which I speak is founded, as I have demonstrated over and over again in my writings and my notes, on the existence of a personage

¹ Every act of the Jesus of the New Testament, every word attributed to him, every event related of him during the three years of the mission he is said to have accomplished, rests on the programme of the Cycle of Initiation, a cycle founded on the Precession of the Equinoxes and the Signs of the Zodiac. When the Hebrew Gospel not according to but by Matthew the Gnostic, of whom they have made an Evangelist—the Gospel of which (saint) Jerome spoke in the IVth century and which he refused to translate on the pretext that it was falsified (!) by Seleucus, the Manichaean disciple (See Hieronymus, De viris illust., cap. 3)—when, I say, that original document shall have been translated, if ever it is found, and the Christian Churches will have at least one document not falsified, then only will it be feasible to speak of the “life of Jesus,” of the events of which “no one is ignorant.” Meanwhile, and without losing time arguing the subject of the century in which Jesus or Jehoshua lived, one fact is certain, namely that the Occultists are prepared to prove that even the sacramental words attributed to him on the cross have been disfigured, and that they mean something quite different from what the Greek translation conveys. See my additional notes (No. 2) in a forthcoming number of Le Lotus. [The additional notes mentioned by HPB in several places were not published in Le Lotus, but the crux of No. 2 is discussed in Lucifer, August 1888, p. 492-495.]

called Jehoshua (from which Jesus has been made) born at Lüd or Lydda about 120 years before the modern era. And if this fact is denied—to which I can hardly object—one must resign oneself to regard the hero of the drama of Calvary as a myth pure and simple. As a matter of fact, in spite of all the desperate research made during long centuries, if we set aside the testimony of the “Evangelists,” i.e., unknown men whose identity has never been established, and that of the Fathers of the Church, interested fanatics, neither history, nor profane tradition, neither official documents, nor the contemporaries of the soi-disant drama, are able to provide one single serious proof of the historical and real existence, not only of the Man-God but even of him called Jesus of Nazareth, from the year 1 to the year 33. All is darkness and silence. Philo Judaeus, born before the Christian Era, and dying quite some time after the year when, according to Renan, the hallucination of a hysterical woman, Mary of Magdala, gave a God to the world, made several journeys to Jerusalem during that interval of forty-odd years. He went there to write the history of the religious sects of his epoch in Palestine. No writer is more correct in his descriptions, more careful to omit nothing; no community, no fraternity, even the most insignificant, escaped him. Why then does he not speak of the Nazarites? Why does he not make the least allusion to the Apostles, to the divine Galilean, to the Crucifixion? The answer is easy. Because the biography of Jesus was invented after the first century, and no one in Jerusalem was better informed on the subject than Philo himself. We have but to read the quarrel of Irenaeus with the Gnostics in the 2^nd century, to be certain of it. Ptolemaeus (180 A.D.), having remarked that Jesus preached one year according to the legend, and that he was too young to have been able to teach anything of importance, Irenaeus had a bad fit of indignation and

testified that Jesus preached more than ten or even twenty years! Tradition alone, he said, speaks of ten years (Contra Haereses, lib. II, cap. 22, para. 4-5). Elsewhere, he makes Jesus die at the age of fifty years or more!! Now, if as early as the year 180, a Father of the Church had recourse to tradition, and if no one was sure of anything, and no great importance was attributed to the Gospels—to the Logia of which there were more than sixty—what place has history in all of this? Confusion, lies, deceit, and forgery, such is the ledger of the early centuries. Eusebius of Caesarea, king of falsifiers, inserted the famous 16 lines referring to Jesus in a manuscript of Josephus, to get even with the Gnostics who denied that there ever had been a real personage named Jesus.¹ Still more: he attributed to Josephus, a fanatic who died as he had lived, a stubborn Jew, the reflection that it is perhaps not correct to call him (Iasous) a man (αυήρ), because he was the Lord’s Anointed, i.e., the Messiah!! (Vide Josephus, Antiq., lib. XVIII, cap. iii, 3.)

But what use is it to waste time repeating what every well-educated man knows. The Abbé continually refers us to the Gospels and to St. Paul, and, showering on us a torrent of quotations, triumphantly demands: “Is this clear enough? Did not Christ himself say this and that, and does not St. Paul assure us that. . . etc., etc., ”

It is hardly necessary to say that for the words of Jesus to possess any value as proof, the authenticity of the Gospels must first be proved. Jesus, whether he lived at that epoch or earlier, never wrote anything, and what he has

¹ Add to this that he invented the famous monogram for the Labarum of Constantine (a combination of X Chi, and P Rho, initials of Christos which he applied to Jesus) and fabricated the vision of that Emperor. But Gibbon and other historians have judged Eusebius long ago, and his value is well known now. See my notes (No. 3), on this subject, in a forthcoming number of Le Lotus.

been made to say in the four Gospels is sometimes terribly contradictory. As to Paul, undoubtedly a historical personage, it would be difficult to separate, in his writings, what he said himself and what his editors and correctors have made him say. However, there remains—doubtless by inadvertence—one expression, by him or by his collaborators, which sums up in two words what was thought about Jesus. Look up the Epistle to the Hebrews, ii, 9; you will read there that Jesus was made “inferior to the angels.” That is enough for us.

Can one who is inferior to the angels be God, the Infinite and the Only?

Indeed, every man, every Ju-su (name of Horus, Khonsu, the Son, the type of humanity), above all, every initiate whose body is made inferior to that of the angels, can say, in the presence of his Âtman (Divine Spirit): Vivit vero in me Christus, as he would say: Krishna, Buddha, or Ormuzd lives in me.¹ After having repeated what I said in my “Notes” about the Christos developing only through the Chrestos, the Abbé, as if he were saying something new which emanated from him, exclaims in threatening tone that no one will enter into that glorified body except by the “strait gate and narrow way.” For him, this is the blessed Nirvâna, and he continues to

¹ In Hebrew, man or Aïsh (שיא) gives this other form by Kabalistic derivation שי Jesh, in Greek and in French Jes-us, signifying at once fire, sun, divinity, and man. This word (with its masoretic points) was pronounced שא ish or Jesh, man in this case. The feminine form was השא Issa, woman; in Egyptian Isi-s, Isis. The collateral form of it was ישי Jesse, or Isi, of which the feminine in Egyptian was Isi-s. But Isi is the equivalent of Jesse, the father of David, of the race from which came Jesus, Jes-us. It is necessary that one should know the Mystery language and that of Symbolism before speaking with so much authority, and that language the Church has lost. See my notes (No. 4), in a forthcoming number of Le Lotus.

preach what we have been preaching for twelve years and what I repeated in my “Notes.” He must let me complete what he leaves in such fine shape, unable to find that path except in the bosom of his Church, of his own faith. Unfortunately his angusta porta, et arcta via can apply neither to his Church nor to his faith. In that Church where everything is bought, crimes and indulgences, amulets and beatitudes (on earth, at least; as to Heaven—after me the Deluge!), the way and the gate become wider in proportion to the sums paid by the faithful. Be gone, religion of Judas! It was to (saint) Peter that his Master said: VADE RETRO SATANAS! The proof of this is in the Gospel itself, I say, repeating the customary expression of the Abbé Roca.

He sends me to Damascus that I may become “a perfect initiate and the greatest of Christian Buddhists”(?). What would he say if I told him that it is after long years passed in the state of Chrȇstos, after thirty years of physical and moral martyrdom, that I have got there, and that it is precisely on that glorious path that I have discovered that the Churches, which style themselves Christian, are nothing but whited sepulchres filled with the dead bones of esoteric paganism and moral putrefaction. So I prefer by far to remain the humblest of esoteric Buddhists than the greatest of orthodox and exoteric Christians. I have the most profound respect for the transcendental idea of the universal Christos (or Christ) which lives in the soul of the Bushman and the savage Zulu, as well as in that of the Abbé Roca, but I have the keenest aversion for the Christolatry of the Churches. I hate those dogmas and doctrines which have degraded the ideal Christos by making of it an absurd and grotesque anthropomorphic fetish, a jealous and cruel idol which damns for eternity those who decline to bow down

before it.¹ The least of the Gnostic Docetae who claimed that Jesus crucified was nothing but an illusion, and his story an allegory, was much nearer the truth than a “saint” Augustin or even an “Angel of the Schools.” A pagan living a simple and patriarchal life, loving his neighbour and doing his duty, is a thousand times nearer the angusta porta, et arcta via than was ever a (saint) Cyril, the ferocious murderer of Hypatia, or a (saint) Constantine, probably beatified because he killed his son with his own hands, boiled monks in pitch, disemboweled his wife, and made himself as miserably famous as Nero.²

Oh, the Abbé informs us, “if the sublime conception of that Christian ideal [the Christos living within man] is

that of the Mahȃtmans, honour to them!” That ideal is not Christian, nor has it been invented by the Mahȃtmans; it was the apotheosis of the Mysteries of Initiation. As to the “Word made Flesh,” it is the heritage of the whole of humanity, received by man the moment the universal Soul incarnated in him, i.e., from the appearance of the first perfect man—who, by the way, was not Adam.

By way of proving that Jesus was God, we are offered his martyrdom on the Cross and his voluntary sacrifice. Before believing a “Master” the equal of “Christ,” he should have to agree to drink from the chalice that Jesus drained at Gethsemane and to pardon his executioners for his moral and physical tortures. A strange idea, truly! But it is exactly the insignificance of those sufferings that makes every pagan smile in pity. What are three years of sermons and of living in the open, ended by a few hours of suffering on the cross, compared with the eighty years of moral torture of Gautama the Buddha, before which all the tortures of the flesh fade into insignificance! Ah, Monsieur l’Abbé, it is more difficult, more meritorious and more divine, to live voluntarily for Humanity than to die for it. And how? By a violent and inevitable death from which escape is attempted by praying his heavenly Father to remove the chalice. For that is, word for word, the narrative of the Gospels. Are you going to interest a yogi or a fanatical fakir in those sufferings if you interpret them to him literally!¹

¹ I refer the Abbé to the accounts of what Monsieur Jacolliot saw in India, and which all who have lived there could see at any time. Consider those fanatical yogis who, at each new moon, hang themselves by the skin of the back to an iron hook fixed at the end of a horizontal branch on the top of a high post. This arm, like a see-saw, lifts them high in the air and makes them twirl round till the bleeding flesh breaks away and the voluntary martyr is hurled perhaps twenty paces. Look at those who, for long years, burn

Being assured that¹ have not understood it, I am instructed in the true meaning of the conversion of (saint) Paul. Saint Paul, according to the Abbé Roca, was “an initiate of the Essenian School . . . . a perfect Nazarite, as he tells us himself” (p. 261). I thank him for this information, but regret being unable to accept it. A Nazarite-Essene would be the equivalent of a Brahman-Buddhist; albeit we have heard a hybrid creature said formerly to have lived in Paris, spoken of as a “Brȃhman-Buddhist priest”! Paul, whatever he might have been, could not have been at the same time an Essene and a Nazarite, if by Nazarite is meant the Nazar sect of the Old Testament, mentioned even in Genesis. The Essenes had a horror of oil and wine, while the Nazars made use of both (see Numbers, vi, 20). The former did not recognize the “anointed of the Lord” and used water to wash themselves several times daily, like the Hindus and Buddhists; the Nazars never washed but anointed themselves all over with oil. It is true that Paul tells us in the Epistle to the Galatians (i, 15 et seq.) that he had been “separated” for the Lord’s service from his birth: i.e., pledged to the nazarship; but, as he says elsewhere (I Cor., xi, 14) that it is a shame to wear long hair (as Jesus and St. John are represented as doing), this proves that he remained a Nazar¹ only until his conversion to the Christos of the Gnostics. John the Baptist was a real

their bodies over hot coals every day, and those who bury themselves to the neck and remain thus all their lives exposed to the blazing sun, the cold of freezing nights, the myriads of insects and savage beasts, not to mention hunger and thirst and other delights of that kind.

¹ Nazar = the Separated (See Genesis, xlix, 26; Numbers, vi, 2; Judges, xiii, 5, etc.). This word, when written without the masoretic points, and reading NZR, דוב, actually yields the key to its Kabalistic significance in its three letters, because nun signifies the matrix, the letter O, the woman; zayin, the emblem of spiritual Sovereignty, the Sceptre; and resh, the head, the circle. The razor was never allowed to touch the hair or beard of the true Nazar.

Nazar, also John of the Apocalypse, but Saul ceased to be so when he became Paul. So then, he was not a “perfect Nazarite.” He was no longer an Essene either, because what they held as most sacred after God was Moses, his Genesis, and the observance of the Sabbath, and Paul had renounced Moses and the Sabbath. What are we to do? The Abbé tells us one thing, and history with both Testaments, quite another.

So it is quite useless to tell the occultists that “what was revealed to Paul was not by any means the Christos of the Gnostics . . . . but really the Chrestos with all the arcana of his abasement and of his annihilation.” This Chrestos is exactly the Chrestos-Christos of the Gnostics. Paul was never an apostle of ecclesiastical Christianity, being the Gnostic adversary of Peter. As proof of this fact we have the authentic words of Paul, which were overlooked in the revision and correction, and the double meaning, that disharmony which runs through the Epistles. If two men are in possession, I will not say of the absolute truth but of a fact established by evidence, in other words, of a relative truth, why does the one say of the other that he withstood him to his face (Gal., ii, 11), and why does Paul show such contempt for the claim of Peter (Cephas), James and John to be considered as “pillars of the Church”?

It is equally useless to refer me to Dr. Sepp and his Life of Christ. I read it twenty years ago and found nothing else but fanaticism and plagiarism, conscious or unconscious, of the religion of the Brȃhmanas. It is not just from yesterday that we have known the chrono-sidereal system of this Bavarian with a lively imagination. Many curious things could be said of his calculation of the Saros—a Japanese salad composed of the

calculations of Pliny and Suidas. I will mention but one.¹ Every Theosophist knows of the great period of Mahȃ-yuga whose divisions always lead us back to the figure 432. Thus Kali-yuga²—the black and evil age of the Brȃhmanas, during which the world expiates the sins of the three preceding yugas and to whose help no Avatȃra will come before its close³—will last 432,000 years, while the total of the Mahȃ-yuga, made up of the Satya, Tretȃ, Dwȃpara and Kali-Yugas makes 4,320,000 years. This is a mystical calculation that the Brȃhmanas give only to their Initiates, a calculation which has made our Orientalists, who can make nothing of it, utter many absurdities.⁴ Well, the celebrated Munich professor has let the cat out of the bag. In Volume I (p. 9) of his book, he gives us the following key:

“It is an asserted fact [by Kepler] that at the moment of the incarnation, all the planets were in conjunction in the sign of the Fishes which the Jews called, from the beginning of things, the constellation of the Messiah. The Star of the Magi was found in that constellation . . .” This was the famous planet that everyone in London could see this year, the beautiful Venus-Lucifer of which a Kabalistic Jewish tradition says that it will one day absorb the 70 planets which preside over the various nations of the world. As to Dr. Sepp, he claims that in virtue of these natural prophecies it was written in the stars that the Messiah had to appear in the lunar year of the world

¹ Vie de N.-S. Jésus-Christ, Vol. II, p. 417.

² Among other errors, Saint-Yves d'Alveydre (Mission des Juifs) makes of it the Golden Age, the age of spiritual rebirth. — Editor, Le Lotus.

³ See my notes on this subject (No. 6), in a forthcoming number of Le Lotus.

⁴ See my notes on this subject (No. 7), in a forthcoming issue.

4320, in that memorable year when the “whole choir of planets was in jubilee.”

Thus, to admit Dr. Sepp’s whimsical notions published in his “fine monument to the Christian Gnosis,” we must, while closing our eyes and compressing our brains:

1. Believe that the world is only six thousand years old—not a day more. (Long live Genesis and the Chronology of Moses!)
2. Assume that this famous conjunction took place in the year 1 of our era, and not four or five years before the Christian era as Kepler himself proved.
3. Forget what we know in order to allow the miraculous fantasies of the ecclesiastics to be triumphant. Now, we know that this astronomical calculation was borrowed by the Jews from the Chaldeans, from their 432,000 dynastic years, which they themselves had received from the 4,320,000 years of the Brȃhmanical Mahȃ-yuga.

And we should have to accept that fine passage “of the gnosis” from Bavaria! We would be inclined to believe that Dr. Sepp had found it at the bottom of a pot of beer, did we not know that long before him Col. Wilford, who was so nicely tricked by the Brȃhmanas¹ at the beginning of this century, had himself made the famous calculation, preserved to this day, by the way, in the volumes of the Royal Asiatic Society’s Library in

¹ The Brȃhmanas, annoyed at the persistence with which Col. Wilford searched for Adam and Eve, Noah and his three sons, composed a pretty little Purȃna with those names in Sanskrit, which they inserted in some old manuscripts. Sir William Jones himself was caught by this, and with him the whole of Europe. See Introduction to the Science of Religion, by Max Müller.

Calcutta, and in all the European libraries. To repeat, does the Abbé Roca wish us to abandon the 4,320,000 years of our Mahȃ-yuga in order to accept the 4,320 lunar years that Dr. Sepp puts between the Creation of the World and the Nativity?

After all, it may be that I contradict the Abbé Roca less than I imagine, as he himself says. So much the better, so much the better. Furthermore, the application of his metaphor of the “white ray decomposing into three principal colours which, etc.” is found in my Isis Unveiled (Vol. II, p. 639) written nearly twelve years ago.¹ Perhaps some day, then, we shall understand each other. In the meantime, I will send Le Lotus some notes² on the last words of Jesus crucified, simply to show the Abbé that we, occultists, know what some Fathers of the Church believed they knew. Whence came, for instance, the esoteric tradition (because the aforesaid Fathers could not have seen him personally) that “Christ, dying on the cross . . . held his face turned, his eyes opened, and his arms extended towards the West”? In my Notes I shall explain everything, except the assertion that the Crucified, whose hands were restrained by two big nails to the two lateral arms of the cross, had “his arms extended towards the

West,” a feat difficult to be performed by a “crucified one.” But that is an insignificant detail.

In closing I will say that I still think the Abbé deceives himself and that his hope is optimistic. I accept Victor Hugo as a great poet, but I have never heard it said that he was a prophet. As to the closing words (quant au mot de la fin, ou de la faim)¹ which my interlocutor flings at me in the guise of farewell, I would have him observe:

1. that misery and dirt are found practically everywhere where the Catholic priest rules, and,
2. that there, near the Mahȃtmans, as he says, there are no poor for the good reason that there are no rich; other people, besides the mendacious missionaries, have been there.

And now that I have answered the Abbé Roca, the Catholic priest, I will terminate this unduly lengthy reply by addressing Mr. Roca, my critic and interlocutor, who is as courteous as he is spiritual when he is willing to forget his cassock. It is to the latter that I express my sincere regret that I have had to parry all his blows and to contradict him in everything and everywhere. If he thinks this reply, as well as my previous “Notes,” to be a new “drubbing,” he will be wrong. For if we do not understand one another—though he may say he understands me very well—that is because, while in appearance we are both speaking the same language, our ideas as to the value and meaning of Christian esotericism, of Brȃhman-Buddhist esotericism, and of that of the Gnostics, are diametrically opposed. He derives his conclusions and his esoteric data from sources which I

¹ A pun on words. The French word “faim” means hunger. The “closing words” of the Abbé hint at misery and hunger in the Orient.

could not know, since they are of modern invention, while I am speaking to him in the language of the ancient Initiates and offer him the conclusions of archaic esotericism which, in their turn, as far as I can see, are quite unfamiliar to him.

To define with accuracy and without ambiguity our respective positions, it seems to me that, while I offer an esoteric outline of the universal Christos, i.e., of the impersonal and pre-Christian LOGOS, he answers me by falling back upon the sectarian Christ of the modern era, on the ecclesiastical and dogmatic Christ whose pattern is pre-Christian. To the esotericism of the ancient Gnosis that he declares the Church has lost, he opposes the scholastic esotericism of the Middle Ages. He tries to get even with me by means of the subtleties of theologians and Rosicrucians who, to escape being burned alive, concealed themselves under a cloak of orthodoxy and openly affected a Christianity against which they protested in secret. In view of all this, how could we understand each other? As to “better appreciating each other,” I thank the Abbé for his kind wishes, while doubting whether he can ever appreciate the smoothness of my manners combined with the extreme frankness of my language; as for myself, I beg him to believe that I have always appreciated in him the able writer of large and liberal heart, as well as the fearless priest who has the rare courage of his opinions.

After all, vera pro gratiis, even though that saying ought to be followed by its opposite, veritas odium parit.

H. P. BLAVATSKY,
Corresponding-Secretary of The Theosophical Society.

REPLY¹ OF ABBE ROCA

To Madame Blavatsky’S Allegations Against Christian Esotericism

[Le Lotus, Paris, Vol. III, June, 1888, pp. 129-150]

[Translation of the original French text comes from Blavatsky: Collected Works, Vol. ix, p. 371-398, Boris de Zirkoff, Compiler.]

I.

We mention it with circumspection, but Madame Blavatsky is rather embarrassing and one hardly knows exactly what course to adopt with her. If you imagine that she has treated you roughly—and I am not the only one to state this—it is because “you have such a sensitive skin.” You are mistaking for smacks the caresses of a hand whose kindness is so Buddhistical that it “would not even strike a dog to stop him from barking.” The lightest puff from her “appears to you as a squall” and what is but a zephyr seems a cold blast to you, La Fontaine’s poor little reed that you are.

Well, let us proceed. Such misconceptions may be understood, if need be; but what cannot possibly be conceived is how the same person may be, in the eyes of Madame Blavatsky, at one and the same time “a fidei defensor,” a catholic priest, a simple cure, about whom one greatly regrets disturbing oneself, and an Abbé who has “thrown his cap of an orthodox and papistical ecclesiastic to the windmills,” and who, “ignoring the true esotericism of the Brahmans and the Buddhists, of the Pagan and Christian Gnostics, as well as of the authentic Chaldean Kabalah, and knowing nothing of the doctrines of the Theosophists . . . . has fabricated for himself a Christianity of his own, an Esotericism sui generis.” She adds: “I confess that I do not understand him.”

I can well believe it! Neither I nor anyone else in the world, dear Madame, will ever comprehend how the same man could be at the same time “a fidei defensor,” a poor

¹ This "reply" of Abbé Roca (p. 96-122) is included for the "record" and is set in a smaller typeface. It is of little relevance today, but Madame Blavatsky's footnotes to it are a useful source of study for students of Theosophy, showing how she dealt with such casuistical arguments.

cure about whom it is not worth being disturbed, and an Abbé deprived of his “orthodox and papistical Biretta.” These terms clash among themselves as light clashes with darkness.¹

I will not say of Madame Blavatsky “that she is talking to the winds and at random,” as she does of me; but it certainly looks uncommonly like it, just the same, and in more than one place. Judge for yourselves: if I but raise my voice a little, then I am taking “a threatening tone” with her. Yet she has kindly acknowledged that I have the meekness, not of a Christian, because the Christians, she says, “are neither humble nor gentle in their polemics,”—but of a Buddhist.

She ought then to be satisfied—but not so. She takes it ill that I should speak as a Buddhist. That language in my mouth has no value to her. My homage produces on her the effect “of a greasy pole erected to serve as a support for Christian gewgaws attached to it in profusion, by an apostolic and Roman hand [good! For this occasion I have become the simple priest again], or of a Hindu-Theosophic doll bedecked with Popish amulets”—Popish, you understand!

Madame Blavatsky is really difficult to satisfy: “Far from being intoxicated by the heady fumes of my laudations,” the latter upset her. “I confess,” she says, “with my usual frankness and my unambiguous rudeness,—I feel but a re-doubled mistrust.” And how black I become in her eyes! Listen to the dilemmas whose four horns she continually throws at me: “Either the Abbé Roca is obstinately determined not to understand me, or he has an ulterior purpose. . . . I believe, I understand . . . . he either speaks to the winds and at random, or he wants to corner me, to force me to explain myself, so as to get a categorical answer from me . . . . and thus compromise me

¹ May it not be that these terms trace their origin to the letters themselves, to the "Notes" of Monsieur Roca? “They appear, perhaps, to be contradictory in his "Notes" and under the handling of his pen—a skilled one—and when the reader has neither my replies nor his own letters—regular literary kaleidoscopes—before him. The Editor of Le Lotus would do well to publish our correspondence, from the first of Monsieur Roca’s letters to the last, together with my replies. The brochure would be interesting, and the public would be better able to judge which one of us is wrong. — H. P. Blavatsky.

in the eyes of Christians among whom I should make fresh enemies—and that would be so much gained.”

This is what she calls “my little arrangement.” Is not this rather scandalous on my part! Wicked Abbé Roca, can there be such cunning in that tricky simpleton? Never mind! The wretch will not succeed in ringing the changes on Madame Blavatsky. "The Editor of the French Lotus might be deceived by it, but the Editor of the English Lucifer has seen through it.” Consuls, sleep peacefully at the feet of the Capitol! There are watchers above, and you will hear their loud calls if the Gauls try to scale it.¹

Mon Dieu! What have I done to this good lady, to put her into that state? It is true that I am a Catholic priest (although I may have "thrown my biretta over the windmills”). And these priests, you know, she knows them by heart! Had she not “along life passed in studying the above-mentioned priests”? I have once been told that "Christolatry” sometimes inspires so much horror in certain souls that they become Christophobes and Priestophobes. Let us hope this never will be the case with the Buddhists, whose meekness is unchangeable.²

Pray rest assured and do not disturb yourself on my account. There is no reason for so much alarm. The Abbé Roca is not at all what he is supposed to be, and he is even grieved to have caused this anxiety. Believe me, dear Madame, neither “do I speak at random and to the winds,” as I hope to prove to you, nor do I seek to do you an ill turn, as you will see later. Your fears are groundless; you are looking for secrets where nothing exists, except perhaps a large share of naïvete.

¹ The geese [oies, in French] saved the Capitol, but the anointed [oints, in French] lost Rome. — H. P. Blavatsky.

² The Abbȇ deceives himself again. I am neither “Christophobe,” seeing that the impersonal Christos of the Gnosis is identical in my eyes with the divine Spirit of Illumination, nor “priestophobe,” because I have the greatest respect for certain priests. Only I suspect Levites in general, the white bands of the Protestant as much as the cassock of the Catholic priest. The odium theologicum is known to me personally in all its fury. But, imbued with Buddhist principles, I hate none, not even my enemies. Does one hate the lightning because one puts a lightning conductor on the roof? — H. P. Blavatsky.

I would willingly tell Madame Blavatsky what this poor Abbé Roca really is, if she had not, however, sized him up better than he himself has been able to do, so far. That lady’s first appraisal was the best; she would have done well to have held to it. Yes, she was more correct than I thought, when she called me an optimist. I recognize it now; I am more than an optimist, I am a simplist who is easily deceived, accustomed as I am to regard everything through the prism of the Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ.

II.

It has cost me a good deal, even at this moment when Madame Blavatsky has dotted all her “i’s” so carefully, to lessen my admiration and esteem for her. No! I cannot, I will not yet believe that she and her Masters are what she so positively affirms.

Just think! I had conceived such delightful hopes at the coming forth of this Hindu Theosophy, at the first accents of these Oriental voices issuing from the sanctuaries of the Himalayas, and which awakened such harmonious echoes in our Christian Churches.¹ I had so longed to believe that these new Sowers were those whose footsteps Joseph de Maistre fancied he already heard on the declivities of the neighbouring mountains. I was taking them for the evangelical workers of whom Christ spoke to the disciples: “The harvest truly is great, but the labourers are few: pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he would send forth labourers into his harvest.” (Luke, x, 2; John, iv, 35.) I wanted to convince myself that the “Brothers” were the Missionaries announced by the prophets, who, as Malachi assures us, will come to turn the heart of the Fathers (of the Orient) toward the heart of the Children (of the West), and the heart of the Children toward the heart of the Fathers, our glorious ancestors of the earliest ages. (Mal., iv, 5-6, and Matt., xi, 14.)²

¹ This is really too much! What? “Oriental voices issuing from the sanctuaries of the Himalayas . . . . awakened such harmonious echoes” in your “Christian Churches,” when the priests of those Churches denounced them the moment they were heard in America or India—as the VOICE OF SATAN! That is a rose-water sentiment, an optimism contrary to all evidence. — H. P. Blavatsky.

² Hindu Theosophy—and the Abbé Roca knows this better than anyone—is declared by his Church as coming from hell. The Catholic bishops of Bombay, of Calcutta and other large Indian cities, were so frightened at the harmony of these voices, that

So then, am I deceiving myself? Your language distresses me, Madame, and will not charm anyone, anywhere in Europe, except perhaps in Turkey.

Then there would be, if the Buddhists do not deceive or slander themselves, two Theosophies, one Christian and the other Pagan, as I understand there are two mysticisms and even three, according to Gorres; and also two Gnoses or Gnosticisms and two occultisms, the one orthodox and the other heterodox, and again two Kabalahs, one dating from before Esdras, the other since him; and finally, two Magics, one white, the other black.

But then, Madame Blavatsky, instead of presenting me to her readers as denuded of all esotericism, and absolutely ignorant of all Theosophy, ought to have, it seems to me, admitted instantly that my Theosophy and my esotericism have nothing in common with those of her Masters,¹

from the very first they compelled the faithful to stop their ears with cotton. They threatened to excommunicate “whoever approached the den of the sorcerers just disembarked from America, of those ambassadors plenipotentiary of the Enemy of God and of the Great Rebel [sick].” That was said by the Archbishop of Calcutta, if you please, in 1879. Another worthy and holy man, a missionary apostolic at Simla, dreading quite wrongly a “trade rival” perhaps, in the midst of a sermon announced my arrival in that rural Residence of the Viceroys of India, as that of “the Pythoness of the Great Accursed” (in the style of de Mirville and des Mousseaux). Were all these “good Fathers” deaf then, inasmuch as they did not hear the harmonious voices, even though their noses were on the Himalayas? Is it not true then that for twelve years the descendants of your “glorious ancestors of the earliest ages”—and why not add to (Saint) Cyril of bloody memory and to (Saint) Eusebius of mendacious memory, the Holy Fathers of the Inquisition, the Torquemadas and Co.—have followed us everywhere, tearing our reputations to pieces because they had no longer the power to mangle our bodies with their instruments of torture? Then all those piles of books and tracts, filled with the blackest calumnies, the most shameless lies, the basest insinuations, emanating from the missionaries, are nothing but a dream? We have them, however, in the Adyar Library. — H. P. Blavatsky.

¹ The esotericism of our Masters (let us rather say their divine philosophy) is that of the greatest of the PAGANS of antiquity. Elsewhere, the Abbé Roca speaks with contempt of the term. I will reply to that later. In the meantime I ask if there is in the entire universe a man so bold (except the ignorant missionaries) as to

for the simple reason that mine are Christian. While hers are Pagan.¹

Well, if she did not begin by doing me such justice at the outset of her refutation, she has carried it out with sufficient good grace at the end, and I thank her for it.

Here is what she says: “While in appearance we are both speaking the same language, our ideas as to the value and meaning of Christian esotericism, of Brahman-Buddhist esotericism, and of that of the Gnostics, are diametrically opposed.” (Who knows? I am not yet really convinced of it, and I will tell why later on.) She continues: “He derives his conclusions and his esoteric data from sources which I could not know, since they are of modern

speak with contempt of the religion of Socrates, of Plato, of Anaxagoras, or of Epictetus! Assuredly, I should be the first to choose the position of servant to a pagan Plato, or an Epictetus, himself a slave, in preference to the office of highest cardinal to an Alexander or a Caesar Borgia, or even to a Leo XIII. — H. P. Blavatsky.

¹ That is what I have done in every possible way. One has but to read my two “Notes” to be assured of this. Yes, there are two Theosophies—the one, universal (ours), the other, sectarian (yours). Yes, there are two Kabalahs, the one compiled by Shimon ben Yohai in the Zohar, in the second century (we say the first), that is the true Kabalah of the Initiates, which is lost and whose original is to be found in the Chaldean Book of Numbers; and the other, that which exists in Latin translations in your libraries, the Kabalah denatured by Moses de Leon in the XIIIth century, a pseudograph composed by that Spanish Israelite, with the aid and under the direct inspiration of the Syrian and Chaldean Christians, on the traditions preserved in the Midraschim and the remaining fragments of the true Zohar. And that is why we find therein the Trinity and other Christian dogmas, and why the Rabbis, who have not had the opportunity of preserving among their family possessions some chapters of the authentic Kabalah, do not wish to know anything of that of Moses de Leon (that of Rosenroth and Co.), at which they laugh. See rather what Munk says on the subject. The mysticism and the Kabalah on which the Abbé and the others rely for data come down to them, then, from Moses de Leon, just as their system of the Sephiroth comes to them from Tholuck (l.c., pp. 24 and 31), their great authority. It was Hȃy Gaȏn (died in 1038) who first developed the Sephirothal system as we have it now, i.e., a system which, like the Zohar, and other Kabalistic books, has been filtered in the Middle Ages in the Gnosis already disfigured by Christians of the first centuries. — H. P. Blavatsky.

invention [not so modern, Madame, as you will see], while I am speaking to him in the language of the ancient Initiates, and offer him the conclusions of archaic esotericism. . . .

To which I answer that one may admit, if absolutely necessary, the co-existence of the two esotericisms, because error is probably as ancient as truth, at least on our earth; but in no case is it possible to admit the priority of the altered source over the pure one.¹

Madame Blavatsky, if she were right, would have rendered us a very great service, but to her own Masters the worst possible one, in opening our eyes as she has done to the paganism of their doctrines. The term is serious, but it is she who uttered it first (observe this point!), and who compels me to repeat it.²

If the assertions I am going to reproduce are well founded, it would follow, clearly, that Monsieur de Saint-Yves was absolutely right when he wrote: “There will come a time when new Judeo-Christian missionaries [and not

¹ Precisely. Now, as Christian theology is the youngest, and as even the Judaism of Esdras is only 400 years older, it follows that the Aryan source, from which the Arhats of Gautama drank, having priority, must be the pure source, while all the others have been altered. It appears, then, that we are perfectly in accord, sometimes. — H. P. Blavatsky.

² I do not deny that. Being neither Christian, Jew nor Mussulman, I must necessarily be pagan, if the scientific etymology of the term means anything. The Abbé Roca gives the impression of making excuses for using the expression he repeats. One would say that he is trying to persuade the readers that it was only a lapsus calami, a lapsus linguae, or what not! Nothing of the kind. What is the origin of the word pagan? Paganus meant, in the first centuries, an inhabitant of the village, a peasant if you like, one who by living too far from the centres of the new proselytism had remained (very fortunately for him, perhaps) in the faith of his fathers. According to the Latin Church, all that is not perverted to the sacerdotal theology is pagan, idolatrous, and comes from the devil. And what does Roman etymology, whose adoption was imposed upon other peoples by circumstances, matter to us? I am democratic, in the true sense of the word. I respect the country folk, the people of the fields and of nature, the honest labourer scorned by the wealthy. And I say loudly that I prefer to be a pagan with the peasants than a Roman Catholic with the Princes of the Church, of whom I take very little notice so long as I do not find them in my way. Once again, the Abbé Roca is making a little fiasco. Vide note 1, preceding page. — H. P. Blavatsky.

pagan-Buddhist] will re-establish a perfect communion of science and love with all the other religious centres of the Earth.”¹

It will be found that these Judeo-Christian missionaries are necessarily the legitimate heirs of the Egypto-Chaldean sacerdotal caste, for Moses, as everyone knows, was initiated in all the Gnosis of the sanctuaries of Egypt (“Et eruditus est Mayses omni sapientia Aegyp-tiorum. . . ”—Acts, vii, 22); these latter sanctuaries were derived, in their turn, by an ascending road from that mysterious and primitive Church of the protogones “quorum nomina sunt inscripta in coelis,” according to the solemn teaching of St. Paul (Heb., xii, 23) We easily ascend the rungs of that glorious genealogy in the splendid work of the author of the Mission.

Madame Blavatsky may see by this that the sources from which Catholics draw are not of modern invention, as she is pleased to say.²

The thesis of the Marquis de Saint-Yves emerges victoriously from the very assertions of my learned antagonist.³ I should lose one illusion; I should confirm myself in my thoroughly Christian convictions.

¹ Mission des Juifs, p. 178.

² Grieved to contradict him again, and always. In my eyes the sources drawn upon by the Catholics are extremely modern in comparison with the Vedas and even with Buddhism. The “solemn teachings” of St. Paul date from the sixth or seventh centuries—when, revised and thoroughly corrected, his Epistles were finally admitted into the Canon of the Gospels, after having been exiled therefrom for several centuries—rather than from the year 60. Otherwise why should (Saint) Peter have persecuted his enemy Paul, personifying him under the name of Simon Magus, a name which has become as generic as that of a Torquemada or a Merlin? — H. P. Blavatsky.

³ I really fear that the thesis of Monsieur (le Marquis, de) Saint-Yves will emerge from my hands no more victorious than the rosy dreams and the optimism of my honoured correspondent. The sources found therein ascend no higher than the personal visions of the learned author. I have never read the entire work, but it was enough for me to read its first pages and a manuscript-review of one of his fervent admirers, to assure myself that neither the esoteric data of the sacred literature of the Brȃhmanas, nor the exoteric researches of the Sanskritists, nor the fragments from the history of the Ȃryas of Bharata-varsha, nothing, absolutely nothing

The Hindu Theosophists would then have given their full measure. As to Theosophy itself, it would certainly lose nothing of its universalist character. Madame Blavatsky recognizes that “Theosophy is neither Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Mohammedanism, Hinduism, nor any other ism: it is the esoteric synthesis of all the known religions and philosophies.” It is true that in her eyes it is not Christianity either; but I venture to think that she deceives herself on this point. To my way of thinking, true Theosophy is indistinguishable from real Christianity, from

known to the greatest pandits of the country, or even to the European Orientalists, supports the "thesis" which the Abbé Roca confronts me with. The book eclipses as a learned fiction the works of Jules Verne, and the Abbé might as well compare my “contradictions” with the works of Edgar Poe, the Jules Verne of American mysticism. The work is entirely devoid of any historical or even traditional basis. The “biography” of Rama therein is as fictional as the idea that the Kali-Yuga is the Golden Age. The author is certainly a man of great talent, but the fantasy of his imagination is more remarkable than his learning. The Hindu Theosophists are ready to pick up the gauntlet if it is thrown to them. Let the Abbé Roca or any other admirer of the Mission take the trouble of transcribing all the passages that mention Rama and the other heroes of ancient Aryȃvarta. Let them support their statements by historical proofs and the names of ancient authors (of which we find no trace in this work). The Hindu and other Theosophists will reply and overturn one by one all the stones of the masonry based on the phonetic etymology of the name of Rȃma of which the author has made a veritable Tower of Babel. We will give all the historical, theological, philological, and above all, logical proofs. Rȃma had nothing to do with the Py-Ramides(!!), nothing either with Rameses, not even with Brahmȃ or the Brȃhmanas, in the desired sense; and still less with the "Ab-Ramides" (!!?) Why not with Ram-bouillet, in that case, or “le Dimanche des Rameaux”? The Mission des Juifs is a very fine romance, an admirable fantasy; but the Rȃma found therein is no more the Rȃma of the Hindus than the Whale that swallowed Jonah is the zoological whale that disports itself in the northern and southern seas. I do not at all object to the Christians swallowing the whale and Jonah if they have the appetite, but I absolutely refuse to swallow the Rȃma of the Mission des Juifs. The fundamental idea of that work would delight those English people who seek the honour of proving that the British nation descends in direct line from the Ten Tribes of Israel; from those tribes that were lost before they were born, for the Jews never had but two tribes, of which one was but a caste, the tribe of Judah, and the other, that of Levi, the priestly caste. The others were only the personified signs of the zodiac. What can Rȃma have to do with all that? — H. P. Blavatsky.

the integral, scientific Christianity, such as is conceived by the author of the Mission, by enlightened Catholics, orthodox Kabalists, and the Johannites of the traditional school of Joachim of Floris, of John of Parma, of the Franciscans and the Carmelites, to which Renan has dedicated the most learned of his works of criticism, which is certainly not his Life of Jesus. (See the dissertation by Renan on The Eternal Gospel of Joachim of Floris, published in the Revue des Deux-Mondes, Vol. 64, beginning with the first part of the issue for July 1, 1866, pp. 94-142.)

III.

As for myself, I had hoped, in my childish simplicity—have I not said it and repeated it enough in my first articles in Le Lotus? —that the “Sages” of the Himalayas would themselves also take part in the erection of that beautiful and glorious Theosophico-Christian Synthesis. Was it a dream? Should it be renounced? Well, no, surely not yet, not so soon!

Madame Blavatsky, it is clear, does not give any quarter; she strikes with a quick and lively hand: “I have put an extinguisher,” she says, “on the rosy hopes that shone in the flame of his first letter because I could not take seriously the simple compliments of civility addressed to the pagan Mahatmans by a Christian and a French Abbé.” The term is there, but it is I who underline it, and for good reason.

Ah! Madame, what you have taken for simple compliments was no trap! It was a sincere expression, if not of a firmly established conviction, at least of an ardent desire and a wish entirely in your favour. Christ could very well get along without the Buddhists, if necessary, but the Buddhists could not do without him, certainly. . . . and you do not intend to do without him either, intelligent as you are.¹ I do not despair of dissipating the misunderstanding. There certainly is one.

¹ I permit myself to reply that Buddha is the elder of Jesus (confused with the Christos) by 600 years. The Buddhists, however, whose religious system was crystallized ever since their last ecclesiastical Council which preceded the first Christian Church Council by several centuries, have been able to do very well without the Christ invented by the latter. They have their Buddha, who is their Christ. Their religion, which transcends in moral sublimity all that had been hitherto invented or preached in this world, is older than Christianity, and all that is fine in the Sermon on the Mount, i.e.,

I do not regret a single word I have published, in view of the agreement in Le Lotus and elsewhere, for if, on the one hand, I receive smart blows and bitter jests in good part, on the other I gain the advantage of having given proof of goodwill, wide tolerance and an entirely Christian—if not Buddhist—brotherliness.

My honoured correspondent flatters herself upon having upset my edifice. She says: “It has crumbled under a slight puff, like a simple house of cards and that was not always my fault.” Whose fault was it, then?

Surely not mine either, and I should be grieved if I had compelled Madame Blavatsky to undermine that foundation, because she would have been working against herself and not against me. It is true that she would have destroyed my hopes. It is also true that she would have broken my heart as a Frenchman, a European, and a Priest of Jesus Christ. But by the same blow she would have destroyed herself and, in that event, upon what would she have had to congratulate herself?¹

all that is found in the Gospels, was already to be found for centuries in the Aphorisms of Gautama the Buddha, in those of Confucius, and in the Bhagavad-Gita. What does the Abbé Roca mean when saying that the Buddhists “could not do without him [Christ], certainly,” when they have done without him for more than 2,000 years? What is he trying to insinuate by speaking of me in the same way? I have the honour to tell him that there was a time when I believed as he does; there was a time when I was idiot enough to believe what had never been proved to me, but now, believing no more in such things and approaching the sixties, it is not likely that I should be caught by the birdlime of fine sentiments. No, there is no “misunderstanding” at all. If, in spite of all my care in dotting my “i's,” he persists in not wishing to understand me, he shows bad faith. May it be that he wants to drag on an impossible polemic because, not being able to answer my arguments by proofs of the same weight, he nevertheless wants to have the last word? In that case I yield to him with pleasure. I have really neither time nor desire to fight windmills. — H. P. Blavatsky.

¹ The Abbé is really too sensitive. I thank him, for his solicitude so very Christian, for my humble self; but at the risk of “breaking his heart” once more, the truth compels me to say that I do not at all understand his obstinacy, notwithstanding my protestations, in bewailing my luck. Unfortunately for him, I have very little softness in my nature. He will not be the one to instruct me. If he continues his jeremiads to the tune of “My Aunt Aurora” he will edify the readers of Le Lotus even less than myself. Let him be calm, and let his afflicted heart be consoled. Those wishing

IV.

Now then. What can this mean? To dispossess Christ of his great conquests? To throw back the civilization inaugurated under his auspices? To overturn his altars in the West? To root out his name from our soil? Beware! Renan, the same Renan that Madame Blavatsky invokes against me, would exclaim: “To tear away that name from the world today would be to shake it to its foundations!” (Life of Jesus)

Too late! He is the Master, his spirit has become our universal spirit for ever, his soul has passed into our soul. Christ and Christianity are from now on merged into one. The principles of his Holy Gospel, all the ideas of fraternity, of tolerance, of solidarity, of union, of mutuality and so many others which are associated with the glorious trilogy of our immortal Revolution, are preparing themselves to triumph with the very principles of modern Civilization, which will carry its benefits to all parts of the world, even to that Orient which does not yet understand it, and which would try to stifle it in its cradle in the West. Mercy of God!

Just heaven! What an undertaking! One of my ideas has been called “baroque”; what shall we call this one, if it really had an origin in any brain at all? Can we not see what is happening? What tremors everywhere! And we are merely at the dawn of the New Day. The Sun which is Christ, “the Solar Christ,” as the Kabalists say, that sun has not yet risen upon us; but the dawn is beautiful, full of radiances, of perfumes, of hopes! And some would wish to

to destroy me cannot do so. I am in no danger. Others, stronger than he, have tried to bend me to their ideas, or to break me. But I have the epidermis of a Tartar, it seems; neither threats garlanded with the flowers of his rhetoric and powdered with the pale roseate tints of his poetry, nor compliments addressed to “my intelligence,” will affect me. I appreciate at its exact value his wish to confound the two esotericisms—the Christian esotericism and that of the old Initiates of submerged Atlantis. That does not prevent me from seeing that his wish is built on the terrain of “Castles in Spain.” The two esotericisms have done very well without each other throughout the centuries, and they can live side by side, without running foul of each other too much, for the rest of the Kali-Yuga, the black and fatal age, the age of sinister causes and effects, which has not prevented it being represented in France as the Golden Age—one of the errors accepted by the Abbé Roca with that innocent faith so characteristic of him. — H. P. Blavatsky.

stop the ascending march of that orb! How senseless! No, neither the Seine, nor any other river in Europe, will see that which the Nile saw, in the words of Lefranc de Pompignan

The Nile has seen on its banks
The dark dwellers of the desert
Insult, with their savage cries
The Radiant Star of the Universe

for then would happen what that poet sings of in the same stanza: Feeble crime, weird frenzies!

While those monsters barbaric
Fling their insolent shouts,
The God, pursuing his path,
Pours torrents of light
On his obscure blasphemers!

That is not possible. No, no! Christianity will never have to repel such an attempt. That cannot be what Madame Blavatsky wishes to say.¹

V.

However, here are terrible affirmations, or rather bold denials; but they reveal their meaning to my understanding, and I will tell you how.

“I deny in toto,” she exclaims, “the Christ invented by the Church, as well as all the doctrines, all the interpretations, and all the dogmas, ancient and modern, concerning that personage. . . . I have the keenest aversion for the Christolatry of the Churches. I hate those dogmas and doctrines which have degraded the ideal Christos by making of it an absurd and grotesque anthropomorphic fetish. . . . Jesus crucified was nothing but an illusion, and his story an allegory. . . . For me Jesus Christ, i.e., the Man-God of the Christians, copied from the Avatȃras of every country, from the Hindu Krishna as well as the Egyptian Horus, was never a historical person. He is a

¹ The Abbé is deceived. That was exactly my idea. The “obscure blasphemers” of which he speaks are the Christians of the first centuries, those bands of catechist-brigands, of ragged and filthy robbers, collected from all the sewers of the Roman provinces and posing as the “guard of honour” of their Holinesses, the Cyrils of murderous memory, the butchers of the Holy Church—that sanguinary bludgeon for nearly seventeen centuries. — H. P. Blavatsky.

deified personification of the glorified type of the great Hierophants of the Temples, and his story as told in the New Testament is an allegory.”¹

These denials are doubtless serious, and it is evident that in these terms and on this ground, no understanding would be possible, no agreement could be hoped for between Christians and Buddhists.²

But one can, happily, turn the question, present it under another aspect, and solve it favourably. We are going to try. One word alone embarrasses me more than all the former ones; it is the one I have underlined above, in the passage from Madame Blavatsky, who has called herself and the Mahatmans PAGANS. But have we to take that strange expression seriously? I do not think so. There must be something equivocal in it, a quid pro quo.

I have an idea that nothing in the world is less pagan than the conceptions of the “Brothers” and their adepts.³ My noble partner will tell me if I am deceived, after having done me the honour of listening very attentively. I beg her to reflect well on the matter, and above all not to imagine there is a trap hidden under my words. My speech is frank, limpid as a rock-crystal.

Let us see, my dear Madame, if you have a clear understanding of the meaning covered by the word pagan in the European mind and according to all our lexicons? (See among others, Quicherat, which I have just consulted again.) The pagans, in Latin pagani, from pagus, a village or hamlet, were the pago-dedite, the villagers, the countryfolk, the ignorant idolaters who took the sacred signs, the religious symbols, for divine realities. How can one

¹ Exactly, the Abbé has a remarkable memory. — H. P. Blavatsky.

² The Abbé is right. No agreement is possible between the dogmatic Christolatry of the Churches, his anthropomorphic god, and the Oriental Esotericists. True Christianity died with the Gnosis. — H. P. Blavatsky.

³ I will explain myself for the last time. The “Brothers” and “Adepts,” being neither Christians, Jews, nor Mussulmans, are necessarily, like myself, pagans, Gentiles to all Christians; just as the latter, and above all Roman Catholics, are pure idolaters to the “Brothers.” Is that clear enough? The Christ of the Abbé Roca said: “Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not” (Matt., x, 5). I am astonished to find an Abbé making so little of the order of his Master! — H. P. Blavatsky.

imagine that the Mahatmans and Madame Blavatsky are that kind of people? I am convinced to the contrary.¹

It is evidently not what this learned woman intended to declare, no more than she meant to make herself out to be anti-Christian when she so maltreated that Christ, the Man-God, whom she does not see demonstrating clearly and plainly his historical existence, by the experimental proof the philosopher employed when he proved motion by walking in front of the negators. Christ lives with us otherwise than as a vain abstraction, for he is about to upset our world and reverse its two poles, setting up on high that which was below, and bringing down that which was on high, just as he declared. Have we indeed eyes and see not?

I know what Madame Blavatsky will say to this. . . We are coming to that. Meanwhile, I will face her with her own words, on this occasion quite suitable and correct: “I have,” she says, “the most profound respect for the transcendental idea of the universal Christos (or Christ) who lives in the soul of the Bushman and the savage Zulu, as well as in that of the Abbé Roca.” However, you are going to see that we shall close by finding the crux of the difficulty, and by scientifically resolving it, perhaps even by finding ourselves in perfect agreement. “So much the better, so much the better,” I will repeat after her.

The difficulty she experiences in admitting a carnalized Christ, as she states, will not remain for ever, I hope. Her eyes are made to see clearly.¹

¹ Grieved, of course, as ever, to dissipate your sweet illusion, dear Monsieur. I needed that lesson in etymology, and I thank the Abbé Roca for it. I fancy, however—though I am not so indiscreet as to ask his age—that I knew all that he has just taught me before Madame his mother had put his legs into his first pair of pants. The pagan or pagans may have been ignoramuses in the eyes of those more ignorant than themselves—those who accepted for coined money the ass of Balaam, the whale of Jonah, and the snake that walked on its tail—but they were not more ignorant for all that. As the most serious books speak of Plato, Homer, Pythagoras, Virgil, etc., etc., under the name of “pagan philosophers and poets,” the Adepts are found in good company. The little lesson is as useless as it is far-fetched. I am a pagan to the Christians, and I am proud of it. I have said it elsewhere: I far prefer to be a pagan with Plato and Pythagoras, than a Christian with the Popes. — H. P. Blavatsky.

Undoubtedly a “personal adjective cannot be applied to an ideal principle” while it remains in the state of an abstract Ideal: but is the Χριστός, or Universal Christ, living in our souls, a mere idea, in her estimation, an absolutely impersonal Principle? I am well aware that she has said yes, but she has also said that the Mahatmans are pagans. There are confusions in this which will have to be dissipated.

VI.

Christ, according to the orthodox Gnosis, is this: he is the Son engendered from all eternity in the adorable arcane of the internal Processions of the divine Essence; he is the living Word, consubstantial with the Father, of whom St. John speaks; he is the Lumen de Lumine of the Nicene symbol, chanted in Christian Churches of all rites and every sect (excepting the Filioque of the Orthodox Greco-Russian Church).² That same Word was conceived before all the centuries and outside the essentially divine Circle, by Ochmah, or the emanated feminine Principle,³ or again

¹ Let us hope so. And it is exactly because my eyes saw clearly, perhaps before my esteemed correspondent was born, that I have no desire to fall back into the Egyptian darkness of ecclesiastical dogmas. I will never accept the inventions of Irenaeus, of Eusebius, of Jerome, or of Augustine. The “orthodox gnosis” is blasphemous in my eyes, a hideous nightmare which transforms the Divine Spirit into a cadaver of putrefied flesh, and clothes it in cheap human finery. I only recognize the Gnosis of Marcion, Valentinus and such others. A day will come when Oriental Esotericism will render the same service to Christian Europe as Apollonius of Tyana rendered at Corinth to his disciple Menippus. The golden wand will be stretched out towards the Church of Rome, and the ghoul which has vampirized the civilized peoples since Constantine will resume its spectral, demoniacal form of incubus and succubus. So may it be! Om mani padme hum!—H. P. BLAVATSKY.

² Yet, the Filioque of the Orthodox Greco-Russian Church is that which is nearest to the Esotericism of the Orient — H. P. Blavatsky.

³ If by “Ochmah” the Abbé means Chokmah-Wisdom (sometimes phonetically written Hochmah), he is seriously deceived again. Hochmah is not “the feminine Principle “but the masculine, since it is the “Father,” Yah, while Binah, Intelligence or Jehovah, is the feminine Principle, “the mother.” Here is the superior triangle of the 10 Sephiroth:

living Wisdom, immaculate and fecundated by Ensoph¹ who is the masculine Principle, issued from God, and called the Holy Ghost (perhaps the Ȃkȃsa² of the Hindus).³

Now then, we Catholic priests, teach that this same Son, this same Word, was made flesh: Verbum caro factum est (John, i, 14—Nicene Creed). Here it is in a few words: This only Son, this Word conceived from all eternity by the

The Crown, Kether

The Mother, Binah
feminine

The Father, Chokhmah
masculine

Kether is the highest point (Eheieh, Being). The microprosopus, the Son, emanates from the two Sephiroth, Chokhmah (or rather Chokhma, because the letter H was added by the Christian Kabalists) and Binah, the two lower points of the triangle. But where has the Abbé studied the Kabalah? — H. P. Blavatsky.

¹ En-Soph was never “the masculine Principle” any more than Parabrahm. En-Soph is the Incomprehensible, the Absolute, and has no sex. The first lesson in the Zohar teaches us that En-Soph (the Non-Being, for it is Absolute Being per se) cannot create. And not being able to create the Universe (which is only a reflection of En-Soph on the objective plane), it can still less engender. — H. P. Blavatsky.

² Ȃkȃśa is not the Holy Ghost, because then Ȃkȃśa would be Shekhinah, while Ȃkȃśa is the noumenon of the Cosmic Septenary whose soul is Ether. Shekhinah is a feminine principle just as the Holy Ghost was with the early Christians and the Gnostics. Jesus said in the Gospel of the Hebrews; “And forthwith my mother the Holy Ghost took me and carried me by one of the hairs of my head to the great mountain called Tabor.” [Origen, Comm, in Evang. Joannis, tom. II, p. 64.] Well indeed, if that is what you “Catholic priests” teach your flocks, I can hardly congratulate you on it and I am sorry for them. It seems, after all, that the Abbé is right in saying that his Christ has “reversed its two poles, raising that which was below, and putting down that which was on high” (vide supra). The entire Kabalah with the Sephiroth has had its share of it, and the brains of the Kabalists also. — H. P. Blavatsky.

³ Madame Blavatsky knows as well as anyone the esoteric value of that sacred hierogram: which, when separated ab intra, gives I and O, which form by their conjunction ad extra the number 10, the symbolic figure of the whole Creation.

Father-Mother who is God then begotten by En-Soph, I, in the bosom of Ochmah, , has come to our Earth, to the south pole of Creation, to take a body and a soul like ours, but not a Spirit, mark well, not a human personality. There are not two persons in the Man-God, there is only the Person of the eternal Son, of the Principle as he calls himself (John, viii, 25); but there are two natures, the assuming nature which is wholly divine, and the assumed nature which is yours, Madame, which is mine, as it is that of the Bushman and the Zulu savage, as it is that of the greatest rascal to be found on earth.

Man had nothing to do with that generic conception; that mystery was accomplished within a Virgin, and could be accomplished only therein. Because that Virgin was none other than Ochmah, the feminine Principle herself, the Spouse of En-Soph, the immaculate Wisdom clothed with a body,¹ as a preliminary to causing the same Word she had already conceived by the Holy Ghost at the north pole of Creation, to pass into human Nature:² and she came, under the name of Mary, to conceive again at the south pole in order to place it within reach of the fallen.

I foresee what she will reply; in fact it is already in her article. She will say: the Incarnation of Divinity in Humanity is “the Apotheosis of the Mysteries of Initiation. The Word made flesh is the heritage of the human race, etc.” Nothing is more true; that language is absolutely Catholic. It is also true, as she adds: “The vos Dii estis

¹ No initiate is ignorant of the fact that spirits clothe themselves to descend and divest themselves to re-ascend.

² I have already had the honour of telling the Abbé Roca that his “Ochmah” (Chokhmah then, if you please) was a masculine principle, the “Father.” Does he want to make of the Virgin Mary the bearded Macroprosopus? Let him open the Zohar and learn therein the hierarchy of the Sephiroth, before saying and writing things which are . . . . impossible. Here is what the Zohar of Rosenroth says, as translated by Ginsburg: Chokhmah or “Wisdom” (הפכח), the active and masculine power (or principle), represented in the circle of divine names by Jah (הי). See Isaiah, xxvi, 4.—“Put your trust in Jah, הי,” etc. Whether Jah be translated as “Eternal,” in the French Bible of Ostervald, or even as “Lord God,” in the English version, he is always God, the Father, and not the mother-goddess, Mary. — H. P. Blavatsky.

applies to every man born of woman.” Here is the way we explain it in the light of the Zohar.

Astral Humanity, or the original and universal Adam-Eve, formed, before the Fall, an integral and homogeneous body of which the divine Christ was the Spirit, if not the soul. The soul of it was rather Ochmah, or the immaculate Wisdom. The Fall took place—I will not determine either the cause or the nature of it now, so as not to have two controversies at once. That fact, well known to Madame Blavatsky, but explained differently by her, brought about the dislocation of that great body—if one can call by that name the biological Constitutions of the spiritual or north pole. My antagonist would express it otherwise; she would say that Humanity passed from a state of Homogeneity or the Heavenly, to a state of Heterogeneity in which it finds itself on earth. Be it so. I am quite willing here to ignore the idea of sin which is implied in our dogma. In any case she was compelled to touch upon the question, very embarrassing for her, of the origin of evil; she has extricated herself as well as she could, but not brilliantly.¹ The Kabalah explains it far better, and The Eternal Gospel printed in London in 1857 (Trubner and Co., 60 Paternoster Row) throws a vivid light upon that mystery. It is of little consequence to the main point of our discussion.

What is certain is that evil desolates the earth and that we all suffer from it. The Buddhists are condemned by their system to ascribe to God a singular paternity with that vos Dii estis interpreted in their fashion. Not only the Bushmen and the Zulu savages but even the Cartouche, the Mandrin and the Troppmann² can use the name and think themselves warranted to bear the title of Sons of God. A pretty family, forsooth.³ The Christian teaching, without

¹ It is not for me to say whether I have extricated myself brilliantly or not. I always know, at least, what I am talking about, and the actual value as well as meaning of the words and the names I use, which is not always the case with the Abbé Roca. I regret to say it, but before giving lessons to others, it would perhaps be well for him to study the elementary Kabalah. — H. P. Blavatsky.

² [The reference is here to three famous French criminals, namely: Louis Dominique Cartouche, a thief (b. ca. 1693; executed Nov. 28, 1721), Louis Mandrin, a bandit and highwayman (b. 1724; exec. May 26, 1755), and Jean Baptiste Troppman, an assassin (b. 1849; exec, at Paris, Jan. 19, 1870.)—B. de Z.]

³ A “family” no worse than that of David, assassin and adulterer, from whom Jesus

defrauding those poor creatures of their paternal heritage, takes at least the precaution of imposing on them a fitting behaviour. It offers them the means, as rational as it is just and easy, to reinstate themselves into the primordial conditions of their original sanctity: You are fallen, degraded; it is easy to recover. Cling once more to that Christ from whom you have cut yourselves off. You do not have to lift yourselves to heaven to reach him: he has come down to earth within reach of you. He is within your own nature, in your own flesh. Every cell, every monad, dropped from his celestial body into the lower regions, is re-associated with him through affiliation with the Church which, according to St. Paul (Eph., i, 23), is the true social body of the Christ-Man—the organized body in which is hidden the Christ-Spirit, as the butterfly is hidden in the chrysalis. And there is the entire mystery of the Incarnation! Where is the absurdity?¹

In what respect does this Dogma shock the reason? In what respect does it repel those who recognize the Christ-Principle, or the Universal Christ? Now, if one denied the existence of that Christ, then indeed it would be impossible to understand each other.

VII.

It is exactly this that I would like to learn from my worthy correspondent before pursuing the controversy any farther.² The question is not exactly that to which Madame

Blavatsky has already replied by saying: “a divine Christ (or Christos) never existed under a human form outside the imagination of blasphemers who have carnalized a universal and entirely impersonal principle . . . . he who would say ‘Ego sum veritas’ is yet to be born.” It is actually another question, a more basic one, namely: Does the Christos exist, whether in heaven or earth, or under any form, divine or human?

I have the honour of warning Madame Blavatsky that even if her visual and conceptual apparatus does not allow her to understand or admit that the Christ-Principle could become the Bodily-Christ or the Man-God, I should consider her still a Christian,¹ and for-this reason:

In our Holy Gospel, which she almost considers, with Strauss, as the Masonic Ritual of the most commonplace human understanding, in the mouth of our Saviour Jesus Christ, whom she takes for an idealization of terrestrial humanity, the blessed words that I interpret in her favour are found, and I am happy to apply them to her with justice—I believe so, at least. Listen to the divine utterance:

“And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man [the Man-God], it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost [the Christ-Spirit], it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world [the present era, which is closing], neither in the world to come [the era which is opening in our day].”² It is indeed remarkable that these words were repeated by the Four Evangelists.³ The reason is that they are of capital importance. The version according to St. Mark is the most liberal of all. It declares that were the things said against the Son of Man blasphemies, these blasphemies would be forgiven, if they were not addressed to the Holy Ghost (loc. Cit.).

Nothing authorizes me, however, to say that Madame Blavatsky has blasphemed against the Holy Ghost: I should rather declare the contrary.¹ Therefore, it is not I who would say rata to her—never, never!

She can convince herself by the very words of our Saviour, that Christ is not that “jealous and cruel idol which damns for eternity those who decline to bow down before it,” since even that insult will find grace and forgiveness before the infinite mercy of the heart of the God-Man.

What I fear for Madame Blavatsky, is that the discussions she has had with Christian priests, and which must have been extremely lively on both sides, since she says she paid “for having known the said priests,” may have greatly contributed to falsify her ideas about Jesus Christ. We must admit that many among us, ministers of his meek and lowly Gospel, hardly shine in our age with a profound understanding of the Arcanes of Christ, and that our tolerance has not always been—indeed far from it—in conformity with that of his heart. It is certain, for example, that the terrible Christ of the Inquisition, our own work, was not at all designed to render the true Christ agreeable or to recommend him, the Christ of the Sermon on the Mount and of the vision of Tabor.² It is equally

certain that our own Christ, the one of the priests, is held in abomination, alas, by many people. He whose example we have sorely neglected to follow, while he had told us: “Exemplum enim dedi vobis, ut quemadmodwn ego foci vobis, ita et aos faciatis” (John, xiii, 15)

VIII.

I close, for this occasion at least, by bringing to light the religious homage Madame Blavatsky renders, perhaps unwittingly, to our Holy Gospel: “The New Testament,” she says, “certainly contains profound esoteric truths, but it is an allegory.” The word allegory will be replaced someday, in the vocabulary of this exegete, by typal work. In all questions, types have the peculiarity, according to Plato, of being at the same time an allegory and the exact expression of a historical reality. Then she will realize for herself that wondrous thing she mentioned in a note: “Every act of the Jesus of the New Testament, every word attributed to him, every event related of him during the three years of the mission he has been made to fulfill, rests on the programme of the Cycle of Initiation, a cycle itself founded on the Precession of the Equinoxes and the Signs of the Zodiac.”¹

Yes, indeed, I really believe it! How could it be otherwise? All this not only rests on the programme but fulfills it and must fulfill it. Christian esotericists disclose the reason of that harmony;² they know and teach that

Jesus Christ is the historical realization of all the virtues and all the spirit of prophecy that had illumined the world before his coming, which had illumined the Seers of every sanctuary and which was diffused in Nature herself, speaking through the voice of the Oracles, and the agency of Pythonesses, Sibyls, Druidesses, etc. Listen to St. Paul’s words on this subject: “Multifariam multisque modis olim dues loquens patribus in Prophetis: novissime diebus istis lacutus est nobis in Filio, quem constituit heredem universorum, per quem fecit et saecula” (Hebr., I, 1-2). The entire admirable chapter should be quoted, and read in the light of the Zohar.¹

We know, moreover, that Jesus Christ was the subject of anticipations, previsions, longings and expectations of all the generations before him, not only in Israel, as Jeremiah says (xiv, 14, 17), but throughout the whole world, among all peoples without exception, as Moses said: “Et ipse erit expectation gentium” (Gen., xlix, 10).²

How would Christ have responded to that universal expectation, how would he have fulfilled the Programme of the ancient Cycle of Initiation, if one text alone, if one point

¹ Yes, indeed! Is that “the light of the Zohar” which emanates from the lamp of your own Esotericism? That light is rather uncertain, I fear; a veritable will-o’-the-wisp. We have just had proof of it. — H. P. Blavatsky.

² A pretty proof, this one! A Jeremiah who said: “The prophets prophesy lies in my name: I sent them not, neither have I commanded them, neither spake unto them: they prophesy unto you a false vision and divination, and a thing of nought, and the deceit of their heart” (Jer., xiv, 14). Now, as the prophets of the Gentiles have never prophesied Jehovah to the people, to whom was the prophesy directly addressed—if it be one—if not to your “glorious ancestors, the Fathers of the Church”? Your quotation is not a happy one, Monsieur l’Abbé. Verse 17 speaks of the nation of Israel, in saying “the virgin daughter of my people,” and not of the Virgin Mary. The Hebrew text should be read, if you please, not quotations from the Latin translation disfigured by Jerome and others. It is the Messiah of the Jews, who has never been recognized as Jesus, that was the “subject of anticipations, and previsions,” by the people of Israel, and it is the Kaiki-Avatȃra, Vishnu, the Primordial Buddha, etc., who is expected “with longing” throughout the entire Orient, and by the multitudes in India. Against the Vulgate, which you quote, I would oppose fifty texts which demolish the edifice built with so much cunning by your “illustrious ancestors.” But, really, let us have pity on the readers of Le Lotus. — H. P. Blavatsky.

only of the ideal conception had been violated by an iota or an apex? That is why he said: “. . . iota unum, aut unus apex non praeteribit a lege, donec omnia fiant” (Matt., v, 18).

Certainly, I agree that the Cycle of Initiation, which Madame Blavatsky knows so well, had a foreknowledge of other things than those which have been realized up to the present under the influence of Christ.¹ Yes indeed, but the career of the Redeemer of the world is not yet over; his mission is not finished; it has hardly begun. . . We are only at the very beginning, in the preparatory stage, of the Holy Gospel. Our theology is quite primitive and our civilization merely outlined and still extremely crude. Let the Christ-Spirit-Love, the promised Paraclete, come! He is in the clouds, he approaches, he descends through the thick fog of our understanding and the icy indifference of our hearts. He returns, exactly as he said, and in the vesture he foretold in his language of parables.² How many are the souls who already feel, with Tolsti, the gentle breezes of a new springtime! And how many others who, with Lady Caithness, see the dawning of the radiant Aurora of the new era!

The Second Coming is taking place exactly as Jesus has predicted it.

I will stop here. If Madame Blavatsky really wishes it, we will resume, and perhaps I shall, happily enough, be able to furnish her the scientific proofs loudly demanded of me by that fine soul athirst with a holy desire for divine truth, and which, without knowing it, adores the Christ.³

¹ That is excellent, indeed. The confession comes a little late, but, better late than never. — H. P. Blavatsky.

² When the “language of the parables” shall be correctly understood, and when all that belongs to Caesar—pagan—in the Gospels shall be rendered unto Caesar (to Buddhism, Brahmanism, Lamaism and other “isms”), we may resume this discussion. Awaiting that happy day. — H. P. Blavatsky.

³ I willingly pardon the Abbé Roca his little lapsus linguae, on condition that he studies his Kabalah more seriously. My “fine soul” demands nothing at all from my too petulant correspondent; and if that soul “loudly” demands anything at all, it is that her convictions should not be distorted and that she should be left alone. I will spare the Abbé Roca his “scientific proofs.” Science cannot exist for me outside of truth. Since I impose my beliefs on no one, let his keep his—even that the Eternal Father (Chochma) is his feminine principle. I can assure him, upon my word of

Dear Madame, let us mutually forgive one another our little vivacities. What would you? Though the Sermon of Perfections and Beatitudes may have been preached to us—to you on the Mount of Gaya nearly three thousand years ago, to me on the Mount of Galilee less than two thousand years ago—nevertheless, it is to fallen Humanity that our inborn weaknesses are due: Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto.¹

Abbé Roca,
Honorary Canon.

Alchemy In The Nineteenth Century

[La Revue Theosophique, Paris, Vol. II, Nos. 8, 9, 10, October, November and December, 1889, pp. 49-57, 97-103, 145-149, respectively.]

[Translation from Blavatsky: Collected Writings, Vol. XI, pp. 528-550¹]

The language of archaic Chemistry or Alchemy has always been, like that of ancient religions, symbolical.

We have shown in The Secret Doctrine that everything in this world of effects has three attributes or the triple synthesis of the seven principles. In order to state this more clearly, let us say that everything which exists in this, our world, is made up of three principles and four aspects, just as is the case with man himself. As man is a composite being, consisting of a body, a rational soul and an immortal spirit, so each object in nature has an objective exterior, a vital soul, and a divine spark which is purely spiritual and subjective. As the first of these propositions cannot be denied, the second can hardly be either, for if official Science admits that metals, woods, minerals, powders and drugs can produce

¹ [While the basic translation is from Blavatsky: Collected Writings, there have been a few changes in accord with those familiar with French in the United Lodge of Theosophists as e.g.,{p. 533} positive changed to absolute, wealth changed to gold, {p. 536fn} mist changed to clouds, {p. 537} large number changed to sufficient, {p. 538} in the Spirit changed to, of the Spirit, {p.539} sacerdotal and learned changed to sacerdotal learned, {p. 541} Being changed to nature, {p. 544} in the same say changed to, in the same way, {p. 546, 3rd line} occultism changed to occult sciences, {p. 546, 7th line} jargon changed to, jargon and symbols, {p. 548} especially relating to changed to, of, {p. 548} fire and smoke changed to fire, {p.549} wisest changed to erudite.]

effects, then it tacitly recognizes the latter. As for the third, the presence of an absolute quintessence in every atom, materialism, which has no use for the anima mundi, utterly denies it.

Much good may it derive from that. As materialism is but a proof of moral and spiritual blindness, we may well let the blind lead the blind, and leave it at that.

Thus, as with all else, every science has its three fundamental principles, and may be practically applied by the use of all three, or of only one of them. Before Alchemy existed as a science, its quintessence alone acted in nature’s correlations (as indeed it still does) and on all its planes. When there appeared on earth men endowed with a superior intelligence, they allowed it to act, and from it they learned their first lessons. All they had to do was to imitate it. But in order to reproduce the same effects at will, they had to develop in their human constitution a power called, in occult phraseology, Kriyasakti. This faculty, creative in its effects, is so, simply because it is the active agent of that attribute on the objective plane. Like the lightning conductor that leads the electric fluid, the faculty of Kriyasakti conducts the creative Quintessence and gives it direction. Led haphazardly, it can kill; directed by the human intellect, it can create according to a predetermined plan.

Thus was born Alchemy, magnetic Magic, and many other branches of the tree of occult science.

When in the course of ages nations developed, which in their egotism and ferocious vanity were convinced of their complete superiority to all others, past or present, when the development of Kriyasakti became

more and more difficult and the divine faculty had almost disappeared from the earth, they forgot little by little the science of their earlier ancestors. They even went further and rejected altogether the tradition of their antediluvian parents, denying with contempt the presence of a spirit and a soul in this, the most ancient of all sciences. Of the three great attributes of nature, they only accepted the existence of matter or rather its illusory aspect, for of real matter or SUBSTANCE even the materialists themselves confess a complete ignorance; and truly they have never caught the slightest glimpse of it, not even from afar.

Thus came to birth modern Chemistry.

Everything changes as an effect of cyclic evolution. The perfect circle becomes One, a triangle, a quaternary and a quinary. The creative principle issued from the ROOTLESS ROOT of absolute Existence, which has neither beginning nor end, or perpetuum mobile symbolized as swallowing its tail in order to reach its head, has become the Azoth of the Alchemists of the Middle Ages. The circle becomes a triangle, emanating the one from the other as Minerva from the head of Jupiter. The circle hypothecates the absolute; the right line represents a metaphysical synthesis and the left a physical one. When Mother Nature shall have made of her body the horizontal line joining these two, then will be the moment of the awakening of cosmic activity. Until then, Purusha, the Spirit, is separated from Prakriti—material nature still unevolved. Its legs exist only in a state of potentiality; it cannot move nor has it arms wherewith to work on the objective form of things sublunary. Lacking limbs, Purusha cannot begin to build until it has mounted onto the neck of Prakriti the

blind,¹ when the triangle will become the pentagon, the microcosmic star. Before reaching this stage they must both pass through the quaternary state and that of the cross which conceives. This is the cross of earthly magi, who make a great display of their faded symbol, namely, the cross divided into four parts, which may read “Taro,” “Tora,” “Ator,” and “Rota.” The Virgin-Substance, or Adamic Earth, the Holy Spirit of the old Alchemists of the Rosy Cross, has now become with the Kabbalists, those flunkeys of modern science, Na₂Co₃, Soda, and C₂H₆O or Alcohol.

Ah! Star of the morning, daughter of the dawn, how fallen from thine high estate—poor Alchemy! On this our ancient planet, thrice deceived, everything is doomed to tire and to pass away. And yet that which once was, still is and forever shall be, even to the end of time. Words change and their meaning becomes quickly disfigured. But eternal ideas remain and shall not pass away. Under the ass’ skin in which Princess-Nature wrapped herself to deceive fools, as in the fairy-tale of Perrault, the disciple of the philosophers of old will always recognize the truth, and will adore it. This ass’ skin, it would seem, is more congenial to the tastes of modern philosophism and materialistic alchemists, who sacrifice the living soul for the dead form, than Princess nature in all her nakedness. And thus it is that the skin only falls before Prince Charming, who recognizes the marriage betrothal in the ring sent. To all those courtiers who hover round Dame Nature while dismembering her material covering, she has nothing to offer but her outer skin. It is for this reason that they console themselves by giving new names to things as old indeed as the world itself, declaring loudly the while that they have

¹ Sankhya philosophy of Kapila.

discovered something new. The necromancy of Moses has become modern Spiritualism; and the Science of the old Initiates of the Temple, the Magnetism of the Gymnosophists of India, the healing Mesmerism of Aesculapius, “the Saviour,” are accepted now only when called hypnotism, in other words black magic under its proper title.

False noses everywhere! But let us rejoice; the more false and long they are, the sooner they are sure to become detached and fall of their own accord!

Modern materialists would have us believe that Alchemy, or the transmutation of base metals into gold and silver, has from the earliest ages been but charlatanism pure and simple. According to them, it is not a science but a superstition, and therefore all those who believe, or pretend to believe in it, are either dupes or impostors. Our encyclopaedias are full of abusive epithets leveled at Alchemists and Occultists.

Now, Gentlemen-Academicians, this may be all very well, but let us then have some proof of the absolute impossibility of transmutation. Tell us how it is that a metallic base is found even in alkalis. We know certain learned physicists, to be sure, who think the idea of reducing the elements to their first state, and even to their one and primordial essence (see for instance Mr. Crookes and his meta-elements), not as stupid as it appears at first sight. Gentlemen, these elements, when once you have allowed yourself the hypothesis that they all existed in the beginning in the igneous mass, from which you say the earth’s crust has been formed, may be reduced again and brought through a series of transmutations to be once more that which they originally were. The question is to find a solvent sufficiently strong to effect in a few days or even years that which nature has

taken ages to perform. Chemistry and, above all, Mr. Crookes has sufficiently proved that there exists so notably a relationship between metals, as to indicate not only a common source but an identical genesis.

Then, Gentlemen, you who laugh so loudly at alchemy and the alchemists and reject that Science, how is it that one of your first chemists, Monsieur Berthelot, author of La Synthèse chimique, deeply read in alchemical lore, is unable to deny to alchemists a most profound knowledge of matter?

And again, how is it that Monsieur M. E. Chevreul, that venerable savant, whose knowledge, no less than his advanced age, in the full possession of all his faculties,¹ has moved to wonder our present generation, which, with its overweening self-sufficiency, is so difficult to penetrate or rouse; how is it, we say, that he who made so many useful discoveries for modern industry, should have possessed so many works on alchemy?

Is it not possible that the key to his longevity may be found in one of these very works, which, according to you, are but a heap of superstitions as foolish as they are ridiculous?

The fact that this great scholar, the dean of modern chemistry, took the trouble to bequeath after his death, to the Library of the Museum, the numerous works he possessed on this “false science,” is most revealing. Nor have we yet heard that the luminaries of Science attached to this sanctuary have thrown these books on alchemy into the wastepaper basket, as useless rubbish

¹ [Michel-Eugene Chevreul, famous French chemist, born at Angers, Aug. 31, 1786. He died at Paris, April 9, 1889, being then 103 years old—Compiler {Boris de Zirkoff}]

allegedly full of fantastic reveries engendered by diseased and unbalanced brains.

Besides, our scientific men forget two things: in the first place, never having found the key to the jargon of these hermetic books, they have no right to decide whether this jargon preaches truth or falsehood; and secondly, that Wisdom was certainly not born for the first time with them, nor must it necessarily die out with our modern sages.

Each Science, we repeat, has its three aspects; everybody will grant that there must be two, the objective and the subjective. Under the first heading we may put the alchemical transmutations with or without the powder of projection;¹ under the second, all intellectual speculations. Under the third is hidden a meaning of the highest spirituality. Now since the symbols of the first two are identical in design and possess, moreover, as I have tried to prove in The Secret Doctrine, seven interpretations varying in meaning with their application to one or another of the domains of nature, the physical, the psychic, or the purely spiritual, it will be easily understood that only high initiates are able to interpret the jargon of Hermetic philosophers. And then again, since there exist more false than true alchemical writings in Europe, Hermes himself would lose his way. Who does not know, for instance, that a certain, series of formulae may find their concrete application of positive value in technical alchemy, while

¹ [Philosopher's Stone, called also the “Powder of Projection.” It is the Magnum Opus of the Alchemists, an object to be attained by them at all costs, a substance possessing the power of transmuting the baser metals into pure gold. Mystically, however, the Philosopher's Stone symbolizes the transmutation of the lower animal nature of man into the highest and divine. {T. Glos., p. 253}]

the same symbol, on being employed to render an idea belonging to the psychological domain, will possess an entirely different meaning? Our late brother Kenneth MacKenzie expresses this well when he says, speaking of Hermetic Sciences:

. . . To the practical Alchemist, whose object was the production of gold by the special rules of his art, the evolution of a semi-mystical philosophy was a secondary consideration, and to be pursued without any reference to an ultimate system of theosophy; while the sage, who had ascended to the higher plane of metaphysical contemplation, would reject the mere material part of these studies as unworthy of his further consideration.¹

Thus it becomes evident that symbols, taken as guides to the transmutation of metals, have very little to do with the methods which we now call chemical. Here is a question, by the way: Who of our great scientists would dare to treat as impostors such men as Paracelsus, Van Helmont, Roger Bacon, Boerhaave and many other illustrious Alchemists?

While Gentlemen-Academicians mock at the Kabbala as well as at Alchemy (though at the same time taking from this latter their inspirations and their best discoveries), the kabbalists and occultists of Europe in general begin sub rosa to persecute the secret sciences of the East. In fact, the Wisdom of the Orient does not exist for our sages of the West; it died with the three Magi. Nevertheless, alchemy, which if we search diligently, we shall find as the foundation of all occult sciences—comes to them from the Far East. Some assert that it is merely the posthumous evolution of the magic of the Chaldeans. We shall try to prove that the latter is only the heir, first to antediluvian alchemy, and

¹ Royal Masonic Cyclopaedia, p. 310.

later to the alchemy of the Egyptians. Olaus Borrichus,¹ an authority on this question, tells us to search for its origin in the remotest antiquity.

To what epoch may we ascribe the origin of Alchemy? No modern writer is able to tell us exactly. Some give us Adam as its first adept; others attribute it to the indiscretion of “the sons of God, who seeing that the daughters of men were beautiful, took them for their wives” [Gen. vi, 2.]. Moses and Solomon are later adepts in the science, for they were preceded by Abraham, who was in turn antedated in the Science of Sciences by Hermes. Does not Avicenna tell us that the Smaragdine Tablet—the oldest existing treatise on Alchemy—was found on the body of Hermes, buried centuries ago at Hebron, by Sarah, the wife of Abraham? But “Hermes” never was the name of a man, but a generic title, just as the term Neo-Platonist was used in former times, and “Theosophist” is being used in the present. What in fact is known about Hermes Trismegistos, “thrice-greatest”? Less than we know of Abraham, his wife Sarah and his concubine Agar, which St. Paul declares to be an allegory.² Even in the time of Plato, Hermes was already identified with the Thoth of

¹ Olaus Borrichus, Danish chemist and philologist, b. at Borchen, Jutland, April 26, 1626, d. Oct. 3, 1690. His father was a preacher. Distinguished himself as a teacher at Copenhagen and engaged in the study of medicine. Spent a number of years in widespread journeys, while engaged in studies, visiting and staying in Hamburg, in various parts of Holland and in Paris. After graduating as a physician at Angers, France, traveled through Italy, staying for two years in Rome. Returned to his native country, 1666, and was appointed Court Physician. During his travels, he became the friend of numerous scholars who held him in high esteem. (Blavatsky: Collected Works, xi, p. 568)

² St. Paul explains it quite clearly. According to him, Sarah represents “Jerusalem which is above” and Agar “a mountain in Arabia,” Sinai, which “answereth Jerusalem which now is” (Gal, iv, 25-36).

the Egyptians. But this word thoth does not only mean “Intelligence”; it also means “assembly” or school. In reality Thoth-Hermes is simply the personification of the voice (or sacred teaching) of the sacerdotal caste of Egypt; the voice of the Great Hierophants. And if this is the case, can we tell at what prehistoric epoch this hierarchy of initiated priests began to flourish in the land of Chemi? Even if this question could be answered, we should still be far from a solution of our problems. For ancient China, no less than ancient Egypt, claims to be the fatherland of the alkahest and of physical and transcendental alchemy; and China may very possibly be right. A missionary, an old resident of Peking, William A. P. Martin, calls it the “cradle of alchemy.” Cradle is hardly the right word perhaps, but it is certain that the Celestial Empire has the right to class herself amongst the very oldest schools of occult Sciences. In any case, it is from China that alchemy has penetrated into Europe, as we shall prove.

In the meantime, our reader may choose; for another pious missionary, Hood, assures us solemnly that Alchemy was born in the garden “planted in Eden on the side towards the East.” If we may believe him, it is the offspring of Satan who tempted Eve in the shape of a Serpent; but he forgot to patent his discovery, as our brave writer shows us by the very name of that science. For the Hebrew word for Serpent is Nahash, plural Nahashim. As is obvious, it is from this last syllable shim that the words chemistry and alchemy are derived. Is this not clear as day and established in agreement with the severest rules of modern philology?

Let us now turn to our proofs.

The first authorities on archaic sciences—William Godwin amongst others—have shown us on

incontestable evidence that, though Alchemy was widely cultivated by nearly all the nations of antiquity long before our era, the Greeks began to study it only after the beginning of the Christian era and that it did not become popularized until very much later. Of course by this are meant only the lay Greeks, those not initiated. For the adepts of the Hellenic temples of Magna Graecia knew it from the days of the Argonauts. The origin of Alchemy in Greece dates therefore from this time, as is well illustrated by the allegorical story of the “Golden Fleece.”

Thus we need only to read what Suidas says in his Lexicon with reference to the expedition of Jason, too well known to require telling here:

Δέρας, Deras, the Golden Fleece which Jason and the Argonauts, after a voyage on the Black Sea in Colchis, took with the aid of Medea, daughter of Aiȇtes, King of Aia. Only instead of taking that which the poets pretended they took, it was a treatise written on a skin (δέρμασι) which explained how gold could be made by chemical means. Contemporaries called this skin of a ram the Golden Fleece, most probably because of the great value attaching to the instructions on it.

This explanation is a little clearer and much more probable than the erudite vagaries of our modern mythologists,¹ for we must remember that the Colchis of

¹ A. De Gubernatis (Zoological Mythology, Vol. 1, pp. 402-03, 428-32), who finds that because “in Sanskrit the ram is called mesha or meha, he who spills or who pours out,” the golden fleece of the Greeks should therefore be “the cloud raining down water”; and F. L. W. Schwartz who compares the fleece of a ram to a stormy night and tells us that “the speaking ram; is the voice which seems to issue from an electric cloud (Ursprung der Mythologie, p. 219, note 1), makes us laugh. These brave learned men are rather too full of clouds themselves ever to find their fantastic interpretation accepted by serious students. And yet, P. Decharme, the author of Mythologie de la Grece antique, seems to share their opinions.

the Greeks is the modern Imeritia on the Black Sea; that the Rion, the big river which crosses the country, is the Phasis of the ancients, which even to this day carries traces of gold; and that the traditions of the indigenous races that live on the shores of the Black Sea, such as the Mingrelians, the Abhazians and the Imeritians are all full of this old legend of the golden fleece. Their ancestors, they say, have all been “makers of gold,” that is to say they possessed the secret of transmutation which today is called Alchemy.

In any case it is a fact that the Greeks, with the exception of the initiated, were ignorant of the hermetic sciences up to the time of the Neo-Platonists (towards the end of the fourth and fifth centuries), and knew nothing of the real alchemy of the ancient Egyptians, whose secrets were certainly not revealed to the public at large. In the third century of the Christian era we find the Emperor Diocletian publishing his famous edict, ordering a most careful search in Egypt for books treating of the fabrication of gold, which were to be burned at a public auto-da-fé. W. Godwin tells us that after this there did not remain one single work on Alchemy above ground, in the kingdom of the Pharaohs, and for the period of two centuries it was never spoken of.¹ He might have added that there still remained underground a sufficient number of such works, written on papyrus and buried with the mummies ten millenniums old. The whole secret lies in the ability to recognize such a treatise on Alchemy in what appears to be only a fairy tale, such as we have in that of the golden fleece or in the “romances” of the earlier

¹ Lives of the Necromancers, London, 1834 and 1876. — Blavatsky: Collected Writings, vol xi p. 537.

Pharaohs. But it was not the secret wisdom hidden in the allegories of the papyri which introduced Alchemy or the hermetic sciences to Europe. History tells us that Alchemy was cultivated in China more than sixteen centuries before our era, and that it had never been flourishing more than during the first centuries of Christianity. And it is towards the end of the fourth century, when the East opened its gates to the commerce of the Latin races that Alchemy once again penetrated into Europe. Byzantium and Alexandria, the two principal centers of this commerce, were suddenly inundated with works on transmutation, while it was known that Egypt no longer had any. Whence came then these treatises full of instructions on how to make gold and to prolong human life? It is certainly not from the sanctuaries of Egypt, as these Egyptian treatises did not exist any longer. We affirm that most of them were merely more or less correct interpretations of the allegorical stories of the green, blue and yellow Dragons, and the rose tigers, alchemical symbols of the Chinese.

All the treatises that are to be found now in the public libraries and the Museums of Europe are nothing but questionable hypotheses of certain mystics of various times, left halfway on the road of the great Initiation. All that is needed is to compare some of the so-called “hermetic” treatises with those which have been recently brought over from China, to recognize that Thoth-Hermes, or rather the science of that name, is quite innocent of all that. It follows from this that all that was known concerning Alchemy, from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, was imported into Europe from China and transformed later into Hermetic writings. Most of these writings have been fabricated by the

Greeks and the Arabs, in the eighth and ninth centuries, re-fabricated in the Middle Ages, and remain incomprehensible in the nineteenth century. The Saracens, whose most famous school of Alchemy was at Bagdad, while bringing with them more ancient traditions, had lost their secret themselves. The great Geber merits rather the title of Father of modern Chemistry than of Hermetic Alchemy, although it is to him that is attributed the importation of Alchemical Science into Europe.

Ever since the act of vandalism committed by Diocletian, the key to the secrets of Thoth-Hermes lies deeply buried but in the initiatory crypts of the ancient Orient.

Let us then compare the Chinese system with that which is called Hermetic Sciences.

1. The twofold object which both schools aim at is identical; the making of gold and the rejuvenating and prolonging of human life by means of the menstruum universale or lapis philosophorum. The third object or true meaning of the “transmutation” has been completely neglected by Christian adepts; for being satisfied with their belief in the immortality of the soul, the adherents of the older alchemists have never properly understood this object. Nowadays, partly through negligence, partly through disuse, it has been completely struck from the summum bonum sought for by the alchemists of Christian countries. Nevertheless it is only this last of the three objects which interests the real Oriental alchemists. All the Adept-Initiates, despising gold and having a profound indifference for life, care very little about the first two objects of alchemy.
2. Both these schools recognize the existence of two elixirs the great and the small. The use of the

1. second on the physical plane has to do with the transmutation of metals and the restoration of youth. The great “Elixir,” which was only symbolically an elixir, conferred the greatest boon of all: conscious immortality of the Spirit, the Nirvana throughout all cycles, which precedes PARANIRVANA, or absolute union with the ONE Essence.
2. The principles which form the basis of the two systems are also identical, namely: the compound nature of metals and their growth emanating from one common seminal germ. The letter tsing in the Chinese alphabet, which stands for “germ,” and t'ai, “matrix,” which are found so constantly in Chinese works on alchemy,¹ are the ancestors of the same words which we meet with so frequently in the alchemical treatises of the Hermetists.
3. Mercury and lead, mercury and sulphur are equally in use in the East as in the West, and, adding to these many other ingredients in common, we find that both schools of alchemy accepted them under a triple meaning. It is the last or third of these meanings which European alchemists do not understand.
4. The alchemists of both countries also accept the doctrine of a cycle of transmutations during which the precious metals return to their basic elements.
5. Both Schools of alchemy are closely allied to astrology and magic.
6. And finally they both make use of an extravagant phraseology, a fact noticed by the author of

¹ “The Study of Alchemy in China,” by the Rev. W. A. P. Martin, of Peking. [Paper read in October, 1868, at the meeting of the Oriental Society, at New Haven, Conn., U.S.A. — Blavatsky: Collected Writings, vol xi, p. 539]

1. “Study of Alchemy in China” who finds that the language of European alchemists, while so entirely different from that of all other Western sciences, imitates perfectly the metaphorical jargon of the Eastern nations, being an excellent proof that alchemy in Europe had its origin in the Far East.

Nor should any objections be raised because we say that Alchemy is intimately allied with magic and astrology. The word magic is an old Persian term which means knowledge, and embraces all the sciences, both physical and metaphysical, studied in those days. The sacerdotal learned classes of the Chaldeans taught magic, from which came Magism and Gnosticism. Was not Abraham called a “Chaldean”? And it is Joseph, a pious Jew, who, speaking of the patriarch, says that he taught mathematics, or the esoteric science, in Egypt, including the science of the stars, a professor of magism being of necessity an astrologer.

But it would be a great mistake to confuse the alchemy of the Middle Ages with that of antediluvian times. As it is understood in the present day, it has three principal agents: the philosopher's stone used in the transmutation of metals; the Alkahest or the universal solvent; and the elixir vitae, possessing the property of indefinitely prolonging human life. But neither the real philosophers nor the Initiates occupied themselves with the last two. The three alchemical agents, like the Trinity, one and indivisible, have become three distinct agents solely through Science falling under the influence of human egotism. While the sacerdotal caste, grasping and ambitious, anthropomorphized the Spiritual and absolute Unity by dividing it into three persons, the class of false mystics separated the divine Force from the universal kriyasakti and turned it into three agents. In

his Magia Naturalis, Giambattista della Porta tells this clearly:

. . . I promise you neither mountains of gold nor the philosopher's stone . . . nor even that golden liquor which renders immortal him who drinks it All that, is merely dreams; for the world being mutable and subject to change, all that it produces must be destroyed.

Geber, the great Arabian alchemist, is even more explicit. He appears to have written a prophetic forecast of the future in the following words which we translate:

If we have concealed anything, ye sons of learning, wonder not; for we have not concealed it from you, but have delivered it in such language as that it may be hid from evil men, and that the unjust and vile might not know it. But, ye sons of truth, search and you shall find this most excellent gift of God, which he has reserved for you. Ye sons of folly, impiety and profanity, avoid you the seeking after this knowledge; it will be destructive to you, and precipitate you into contempt and misery.¹

Let us see what other writers have had to say on the question. Having begun to think that alchemy was after all solely a philosophy entirely metaphysical, instead of a physical science (in which they erred), they declared that the extraordinary transmutation of base metals into gold was merely a figurative expression for the transformation of man, freeing him of his hereditary evils of his infirmities, in order that he might attain to a degree of regeneration which would elevate him to a divine nature.

¹ [Quoted by Dr. Alexander Wilder in his New Platonism and Alchemy, Albany, N.Y., 1869, p. 26. — Blavatsky: Collected Writings, vol. xi, p. 540.]

This, in fact, is the synthesis of transcendental alchemy and its principal object; but for all that, it does not represent every end that this science has in view. Aristotle who told Alexander that “the philosopher's stone was not a stone at all, that it is in each man, everywhere, at all times, and is called the final aim of all philosophers,” was mistaken in his first proposition though right with regard to the second. In the physical sphere, the secret of the Alkahest produces an ingredient which is called the philosopher’s stone; but for those who care not for perishable gold, the alkahest, as Professor Wilder tells us,¹ “is but the algeist, or divine spirit, which removes every grosser nature, that its unholier principles may be removed . . .” The elixir vitae therefore is only the water of life which, as Godwin says, “is a universal medicine possessing the power to rejuvenate man and to prolong life indefinitely.”

Some forty years ago, Dr. Hermann Kopp, published in Germany a Geschichte der Chemie. Speaking of alchemy, looked at in its special role of forerunner of modern chemistry, the German doctor makes use of a very significant expression which the Pythagorean and the Platonist will understand at once. “If,” says he, “the term world stands for the microcosm represented by man, then it becomes easy to interpret the writings of the alchemists.”

Irenaeus Philalethes declares that

The philosopher's stone represents the great universe (or macrocosm) and possesses all the virtues of the great system, collected and included in the lesser system. The latter has a magnetic power which draws¹

¹ [Ibid.]

to it that which it has affinities with in the universe. It is the celestial virtue which spreads throughout creation, but which is epitomized in a miniature abridgment of itself (as man).

Listen to what Alipili says in one of his translated works;

He that hath the knowledge of the Microcosm cannot long be ignorant of the knowledge of the Macrocosm. This is that which the Aegyptian industrious searchers of Nature so often said, and loudly proclaimed, that every one should know himself. This speech their dull Disciples took in a moral sense, and out of ignorance affixt it in their Temples, But I admonish thee whosoever thou art that desireth to dive into the inmost parts of nature, if that which thou seekest thou findest not within thee, thou wilt never find it without thee. If thou knowest not the excellency of thine own house, for what doest thou seek and search after the excellency of other things? The universal Orb of the Earth contains not so great mysteries and excellencies as a little Man, formed by God to his image. And he that desires the primacy amongst the studiers of Nature, will no where find a greater and better reserve to obtain his desire, than in himself.

Therefore I will here follow the example of the Aegyptians, and from my whole heart and certain true experience proved by me, speak to my Neighbour in the Aegyptians words, and with a loud voice now proclaim. O Man know thy self; in thee is hid the treasure of treasures . . . ¹

¹ [Centrum Naturae Concentratum: or the Salt of Nature Regenerated. For the most part improperly called The Philosopher’s Stone. Written in Arabic by Alipili a Mauretanian, born of Asiatic Parents; published in Low Dutch, 1694, and now done into English, 1696. By a Lover of the Hermatic Science. London, 1696. (British Museum, 1033.d.35.) The translator’s name was E. Brice. The passage quoted above may be found on pages 78-80. — [Blavatsky: Collected Writings, vol. xi, p. 542.]

Irenaeus Philaletha Cosmopolita, an English alchemist and Hermetic philosopher, alluding to the persecution to which philosophy was subjected, wrote in 1669:

. . . many do believe (that are strangers to the Art) that if they should enjoy it, they would do such and such things; so also even we did formerly believe, but being grown more wary, by the hazard we have run, we have chosen a more secret method . . .¹

And the alchemists were wise to do so. For living in an age when for a slight difference of opinion on religious questions, men and women were treated as heretics, placed under a ban and proscribed, and when science was stigmatized as sorcery, it was quite natural, as Professor A. Wilder says:

. . . that men cultivating ideas out of the common order would invent a dialect of symbols and passwords by which to communicate with one another, and yet remain unknown by their bloodthirsty adversaries.²

The author reminds us of the Hindu allegory of Krishna ordering his adopted mother to look into his mouth. She did and saw therein the entire universe. This agrees exactly with the Kabbalistic teaching which

¹ [This is from a small book of Eyraeneus Philaletha Cosmopolita entitled Secrets Revealed: or an open entrance to the Shut Palace of the King. Containing the greatest treasure in Chemistry, never yet so plainly discovered. Published by William Cooper, Esq., London, 1669. 8vo. The passage may be found in Chapter 13, p. 33, and has been checked with the copy now in the British Museum—[Blavatsky: Collected Writings, vol. xi, p. 542.]

² [New Platonism and Alchemy, p. 26. — Blavatsky: Collected Writings, vol. xi, p. 543.]

holds that the microcosm is but the faithful reflection of the macrocosm—a photographic copy to him who understands. This is why Cornelius Agrippa, perhaps the most generally known of all the alchemists, says:

There is one thing by God created, the subject of all wonderfulness in earth and in heaven; it is actually animal, vegetable and mineral; found everywhere, known by few, by none expressed by his proper name, but hid in numbers, figures and riddles, without which neither alchemy nor natural magic can attain their perfect end.¹

The allusion becomes even clearer if we read a certain passage in the Alchemist’s Encheiridion (1672):

Now, in this discourse will I manifest to thee the natural condition of the stone of the philosophers, appareled with a triple garment, even this stone of riches and charity, the strong relief from languishment, in which is contained every secret; being a divine mystery and gift of God, than which there is nothing in this world more sublime. Therefore, diligently observe what I say, namely, that ’tis appareled with a triple garment, that is to say, with a body, soul and spirit.²

In other words, this stone contains: the secret of the transmutation of metals, that of the elixir of long life and of conscious immortality.

This last secret was the one which the old philosophers chose to unravel, leaving to the lesser lights with their modern false noses, the pleasure of wearing themselves out in the attempt to solve the first two. It is the Word or the “ineffable name,” of which Moses said

¹ [Quoted by Dr. A. Wilder, in op. cit., p. 28. — Blavatsky: Collected Writings, vol. xi, p. 543]

² [ibid]

that there was no need to seek it in distant places, “but the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart” [Deut. xxx, 14].

Philalethes, the English alchemist, says the same thing but in other terms:

. . . In the world our writings shall prove a curious-edged knife; to some they shall carve out dainties, and to others it shall serve only to cut their fingers; yet we are not to be blamed; for we do seriously profess to any that shall attempt this Work, that he attempts the highest piece of philosophy that is in nature; and though we write in English, yet our matter will be as hard as Greek to some, who will think they understand us well, when they misconstrue our meaning most perversely; for is it imaginable that they who are fools in Nature, should be wise in our books, which are testimonies unto Nature?¹

Espagnet warns his readers in the same way:

Let a lover of truth make use of but a few authors, but of best note and experienced truth; let him suspect things that are quickly understood, especially in mystical names and secret operations; for truth lies hid in obscurity; nor do philosophers ever write more deceitfully than when plainly, nor ever more truly than when obscurely.²

Truth cannot be given to the public; less so today than when the Apostles were advised not to cast pearls before swine.

All these fragments which we have just cited are, we hold, so many proofs of that which we have advanced. Apart from the schools of adepts, almost unapproachable for Western students, there does not exist in the whole world—and more especially in Europe—one single work on occult science, and above all on Alchemy, which is written in clear and precise language, or which offers to the public a system or a method which could be followed as in the physical sciences. Any treatise, which comes from an initiate or an adept, ancient or modern, unable to reveal all, limits itself to throwing light on certain problems which are allowed to be disclosed, when needed, to those worthy of knowing, while remaining at the same time hidden from those who are unworthy of receiving the truth, for fear they should abuse it. Therefore, he, who complaining of the obscurity and confusion which seems to prevail in the writings of the disciples of the Oriental school, would compare them with those of either the Middle Ages or of modern times, which seem to be more clearly written, would prove only two things: either he deceives the public in deceiving himself; or he advertises modern charlatanism, knowing all the time that he is deceiving his readers. It is easy to find semi-modern works which are written with precision and method, but giving only the personal ideas of the writer, that is to say, of value only to those who know absolutely nothing of the true occult science. We are beginning to make much of Eliphas Levi, who alone knew, it is true, probably more than all our great European magi of 1889 put together. But, when once the half-dozen books of the Abbe Louis Constant have been read, re-read and learnt by heart, how far are we advanced in practical occult science, or even in the understanding of the theories of the Kabbalists? His style is poetical and quite charming. His paradoxes, and nearly every phrase in his volumes is

one, are thoroughly French in character. But even if we learn them so as to repeat them by heart from beginning to end, what, pray, has he really taught us? Nothing, absolutely nothing—except, perhaps, the French language. We know several of the pupils of the great magus of modern times, English, French and German, all men of serious mind, of iron wills, many of whom have sacrificed whole years to these studies. One of his disciples made him a life annuity which he got for upwards of ten years, besides paying him 100 francs for every letter when he was obliged to be away. This person at the end of ten years knew less of magic and of the Kabbala than a chela of ten years’ standing of an Indian astrologer. We have in the library at Adyar his letters on magic in several volumes of manuscripts, written in French and translated into English, and we defy the admirers of Eliphas Levi to show us one single individual who would have become an Occultist, even in theory, by following the teaching of the French magus. Why is this, since he evidently got his secrets from an Initiate? Simply because he never received the right to initiate others.¹ Those who know something of occult

sciences will understand what we mean by this; those who are only pretenders will contradict us, and probably hate us all the more for having told such hard truths.

The occult sciences, or rather the key which alone explains the jargon and symbols in which they are expressed, cannot be divulged. Like the Sphinx who dies the moment the enigma of its being is guessed by an Oedipus, they remain occult only as long as they are unknown to the uninitiated. Then again they can neither be bought nor sold. A Rosicrucian “becomes, he is not made,” says an old adage of the Hermetic philosophers, to which the Occultists add, “The science of the gods is mastered by violence; it must be conquered, and does not give itself.” This is exactly what the author of the Acts of the Apostles intended to convey when he gave the answer of Peter to Simon Magus: “Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money” [Acts viii, 20]. Occult knowledge should be used neither to make money, nor to attain any egotistical end, not even as a means to personal vanity.

Let us go further and say at once that—apart from an exceptional case where gold might be the means of saving a whole nation¹—even the act of transmutation

¹ [HPB expands this comment in her article, “A Few Questions to HIRAF”: “For those who are able to understand intuitionally what I [HPB] am about to say, my words will be but the echo of their own thoughts. I draw the attention of such only, to a long series of inexplicable events which have taken place in our present century; to the mysterious influence directing political cataclysms; the doing and undoing of crowned heads; the tumbling down of thrones; the thorough metamorphosis of nearly the whole of the European map, beginning with the French Revolution of ’93, predicted in every detail by the Count de St. Germain, in an autograph MS., now in possession of the descendants of the Russian nobleman to whom he gave it, and coming down to the Franco-Prussian War of the latter days. This mysterious influence called “chance” by the skeptic and Providence by Christians, may have a right to some

itself, when the only motive is the acquisition of riches, becomes black magic. So that neither the secrets of magic nor of occultism, nor of alchemy, can ever be revealed during the existence of our race, which worships the golden calf with an ever increasing frenzy.

Therefore, of what value would those works be which promise to give us the key to initiation into either one or the other of these two sciences, which are in fact only one?

We understand perfectly such Adept-Initiates as Paracelsus and Roger Bacon. The first was one of the great harbingers of modern chemistry; the second that of physics. Roger Bacon in his Treatise on the Admirable Forces of Art and of Nature shows this clearly. We find in it a foreshadowing of all the sciences of our day. He speaks in it of cannon powder, and predicts the use of steam as a motive power. The hydraulic press, the diving bell, and the kaleidoscope, are all described therein; he prophesies the invention of flying machines, constructed in such a way that he who is seated in the middle of this mechanical contrivance, in which we easily recognize a type of the modern balloon, has only to turn a mechanism to set in motion artificial wings which immediately start beating the air in imitation to

other name. Of all these degenerated children of Chaldæan Occultism, including the numerous societies of Freemasons, only one of them in the present century is worth mentioning in relation to Occultism, namely, the “Carbonari.” Let some one study all he can of that secret society, let him think, combine, deduce. If Raymond Lully, a Rosicrucian, a Cabalist, could so easily supply King Edward I of England with six millions sterling to carry on war with the Turks in that distant epoch, why could not some secret lodge in our day furnish, as well, nearly the same amount of millions to France, to pay their national debt—this same France, which was so wonderfully, quickly defeated, and as wonderfully set on her legs again. Idle talk!—people will say. Very well, but even an hypothesis may be worth the trouble to consider sometimes.” — Eds.]

those of a bird. He then defends his brother alchemists against the accusation of using a secret cryptography.

The Reason then, why wise men have obscured their Mysteries from the multitude, was, because of their deriding and slighting wise men’s Secrets of wisdome, being also ignorant to make a right use of such excellent matters. For if an accident help them to the knowledge of a worthy mystery, they wrest and abuse it to the manifold inconvenience of persons and communities. He’s then not discreet, who writes any Secret, unlesse he conceal it from the vulgar, and make the more intelligent pay some labour and sweat before they understand it. In this stream the whole fleet of wise men have sailed from the beginning of all, obscuring many wayes the abstruser parts of wisdome from the capacity of the generality. Some by Characters and verses have delivered many Secrets. Others by aenigmatical and figurative words . . . Thirdly, they have obscured their Secrets by their manner of Writing, as by Consonants without Vowels, none knowing how to read them, unlesse he know the signification of those words [the hermetic jargon]”¹

This kind of cryptography was in use amongst the Jews, the Chaldeans, the Syrians, the Arabs, and even the Greeks, and largely adopted in former times, especially by the Jews.

This is proved by the Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament, the books of Moses or the Pentateuch rendered ten times more fantastic by the introduction of Masoretic points. But as with the Bible, which has been

¹ [The Latin title of Roger Bacon's work is De mirabili potestate artis et naturae, and the date of its original publication is approximately 1256-57. The translation of the passage quoted by H.P.B. has been checked with the copy in the British Museum which is stated to be a faithful translation “out of Dr. Dee’s own copy, by I.N.” which was published in London in 1659. The passage occurs in Chapter VIII, p. 37. - Blavatsky: Collected Writings, vol. xi, p. 547]

made to say everything required of it except that which it really did say, thanks to the Masorah and the Fathers of the Church, so it was also with kabbalistic and alchemical books. The key to both having been lost centuries ago in Europe, the Kabbala (the good Kabbala of the Marquis de Mirville, according to the ex-rabbi, the Chevalier Drach, the pious and most Catholic Hebrew scholar) serves now as a witness confirmatory of both the New and the Old Testaments, According to modern kabbalists, the Zohar is a book of modern prophecies; of the Catholic dogmas of the Latin Church, and is the fundamental stone of the Gospel; which indeed might be true if it were admitted that both in the Gospels and in the Bible, each name is symbolical and each story allegorical; just as was the case with all sacred writings preceding the Christian canon.

Before closing this article, which has already become too long, let us make a rapid resumé of what we have said.

I do not know if our argument and copious extracts will have any effect on our readers in general. But I am sure, at all events, that what we have said will have the same effect on kabbalists and modern “Masters” as the waving of a red rag in front of a bull; but we have long ceased to fear the sharpest horn. These “Masters” owe all their science to the dead letter of the Kabbala, and to the fantastic interpretation placed on it by some few mystics of the present and the last century, on which “Initiates” of libraries and museums have in their turn made variations; therefore, they are bound to defend such, tooth and nail. People will see but fire, and he who shouts the louder will remain the victor. Nevertheless—Magna est veritas et praevalebit.

1. It has been asserted that alchemy penetrated into Europe from China, and that, falling into profane hands, alchemy (like astrology) is no longer the pure and divine science of the schools of Thoth-Hermes of the first Egyptian Dynasties.
2. It is also certain that the Zohar, of which both Europe and other Christian countries possess fragments, is not the same as the Zohar of Shimon ben-Yohai, but a compilation of old writings and traditions collected by Moses de Leon of Guadalajara in the thirteenth century, who, according to Mosheim, has followed in many cases the interpretations which were given him by Christian Gnostics of Chaldea and Syria where he went to seek them. The real, old Zohar is found in its entirety only in the Chaldean Book of Numbers, of which there exist now only two or three incomplete copies, which are in the possession of initiated rabbis. One of these lived in Poland, in strict seclusion, and he destroyed his copy before dying in 1817; as for the other, the erudite rabbi of Palestine, he emigrated from Jaffa some few years ago.
3. Of the real Hermetic books there only remains a fragment known as the Smaragdine Tablet, of which we shall presently speak. All the works compiled on the books of Thoth were destroyed and burnt in Egypt by order of Diocletian in the third century of our era. All the others, including Poimandres, are in their present form merely reminiscences, more or less vague and erroneous, of different Greek or even Latin authors, who often did not hesitate to palm off their own interpretations as genuine Hermetic fragments. And even if by chance these latter did exist, they would be as incomprehensible to the

1. “Masters” of today as the books of the alchemists of the Middle Ages. In proof of this we have quoted their own personal and thoroughly sincere confessions. We have shown the reasons they give for this: (a) their mysteries were too sacred to be profaned by the ignorant, being written down and explained only for the use of a few adept-initiates; and they were also too dangerous to be trusted in the hands of those who were capable of misusing them; (b) in the Middle Ages the precautions taken were ten times as great; for otherwise they stood a good chance of being roasted alive to the great glory of God and His Church.
2. The key to the jargon of the alchemists and to the real meaning of the symbols and allegories of the Kabbala is to be found in the Orient alone. Since it has never been rediscovered in Europe, what then can possibly serve as a guiding star to our modern kabbalists, so that they may recognize the truth in the writings of the Alchemists and in the small number of treatises which, written by real initiates, are still to be found in our national libraries?

It follows, therefore, that in rejecting aid from the only quarter whence in this our century they may expect to get the key to the old esotericism and to the Wisdom-Religion, they, whether kabbalists, “elects of God,” or modern “Prophets,” throw to the wind their only chance of studying primitive truths and profiting by them.

At all events we may be sure that it is not the Oriental School which loses by default.

We have permitted ourselves to say that many French kabbalists have often expressed the opinion that the Oriental School will never be worth much, no matter

how it may pride itself on possessing secrets unknown to European occultists because it admits women into its ranks.

To this we might answer by repeating the fable told by brother Joseph N. Nutt, “Grand Master” of the Masonic Lodge for Women in the United States,¹ to show what women can do if they are not shackled by males—whether as men or as God:

“A lion passing a monument representing an athletic and powerful figure of a man tearing the jaws of a lion said: ‘If the scene which this represents had been executed by a lion the two figures would have changed places!’”

The same remark holds good for woman. If only she were allowed to represent the scenes of human life, she would distribute the parts in reverse order. She it was who first took man to the Tree of Knowledge, and made him know Good and Evil; and, if she had been let alone and allowed to do what she wished, she would have led him to the Tree of Life and thus rendered him immortal.

H. P. Blavatsky.

¹ Grand Chapter, State of New York, Order of The Eastern Star. Lecture and Discourses in the Grand Chapter: Women and the Eastern Star, April 4, 1877.

Modern Idealism, Worse Than Materialism

[The Theosophist, Vol. XVIII, No. 1, October, 1896, pp. 9–12]

That which is herein presented will be, as a matter of course, Dead Sea fruit to blind materialism; withal it may prove still more distasteful to advocates of Hylo-Idealism—as that modern cross-breed between misunderstood Protagoras and Büchner is now named.

Theosophy has no bitterer enemy than Hylo-Idealism, the great ally of materialism, to-day. This is because, though repudiating the systems of both, we accept most of the physical facts of science, rejecting their conclusions only; while we recognize a good deal of the Vedȃntic doctrines in European Idealism, but none of its highly philosophical and consistent logic. The conclusions of Materialism and Idealism, in fact, are so far stretched, that in their final synthesis they almost meet in their atheism and pessimism. The last word of both—the Alpha and the Omega of Modern Thought, whether traced to the potencies of brute matter, or to the nihilism of idealistic speculation—is a dreary negation of any possible future existence in spirit. Apparently there is an abyss between the two in sober reality—a platform on which both shake hands. The materialism of to-day is only a shade more scientific than the crass fallacies of Büchner and Moleschott. It is the same Death’s Head, with its stereotyped rictus grinning hideously, but now crowned with a wreath of rhetorical flowers woven by Mr. Tyndall’s unparalleled oratory. As to Idealism—of whatever school—it has become “a double caricature” on Kant and Schopenhauer. The “rigour and vigour” type of generalization is prevalent; witness the attitude of Materialists (or Realists) and Idealists toward what J. S.

Mill terms the “battle-ground of metaphysics”—the question of an external world.

The Materialist asserts that matter—or the external Universe—exists independently of a perceiving mind; that the object in short has evolved the subject, which latter in its turn mirrors its author in its consciousness.

The (pure) Idealist, on the contrary will say—“Not so; so far from Mind being the resultant of an evolutionary process from Matter, the latter exists only in consciousness. All we know, or can know, are states of our own consciousness; objects are such only by and through a perceiving Ego—its sensations, and as such, are necessarily phenomenal; with the destruction of Mind, the whole fabric of seeming objectivity collapses.”

In what respect is such an idealist more “ideal” than the Materialist? One denies point blank anything existing outside of matter; the other, that anything is—no more matter than Spirit—that these two positions do not exhaust the alternatives. While it is clear that the Realist is unable to postulate the independent existence of the External World, except by projecting into space the visions of his own subjectivity, the (pure!) Idealist is brought face to face with the assertion of science, that the objective universe existed aeons before the first dawn of human consciousness.

It is from this predicament that we might be rescued by the compromise between the two opposing systems, known variously as Transfigured Realism, Transcendental Realism or, better, objective (as opposed to pure) Idealism—if only that transfigured Realism were to conceive of Object and Subject in the way Vedȃntic occultists do. According to this system, the external world of this our present consciousness is the joint product of Object and

Subject. While non-existent per se—it is said, the creation of the individual mind—matter is equally the sensible manifestation of the objectivity of an unknown Substance (unknown to—the profane only). Mind translates the impressions received from without—impressions radiating from the world of Noumena into panorama of purely subjective ideation. The object as it is given in consciousness is phenomenal, but the primary stimulus comes from without. Subject and Object—as Noumena—are equally real, but the SENSE-OBJECT is a subjective creation. Take, for example, the case of the Sun. To the Realist the glorious orb exists outside of, and independently of Mind, just as it appears in consciousness. To the Idealist it is the creation of Mind and perishes with it. To the objective Idealist, with Mind perishes the phenomenal Sun, but an unknown Substance—removed beyond the possibility of human conception as to its nature—remains.

This—except the “Unknown Substance”—the Occultist will deny. For him, the subject as much as the object, Ego, Sun, Mind and the Universe itself is—a Maya, a huge illusion. But, as both the Perceiver and the Object perceived belong to the same plane of illusion, they are mutual and reciprocal Realities for such time as the Manvantaric illusion lasts. In Reality, and outside and beyond Space and Time, it is all the effect and result of Ignorance. Nevertheless, reverting to the conclusion of one of the greatest thinkers of the day Mr. Herbert Spencer, where he argues that “If, then, the object perceived is self, what is the subject that perceives?”—and concludes that such a process is only conceivable on “the annihilation of both” (First Principles, p. 66)—we say that according to the views of the Occultist he is entirely wrong. Mr. Herbert Spencer knows, it appears, of but one grade of subjectivity, and has no idea of the

occult (Yogic) teaching, of the existence of other and higher planes of consciousness, vision or perception, than those of Mind; of the existence, in short, of the “Transcendental Ego” or true self (Buddhi) a spark from the radiant essence of the Universal Spirit. Consequently, to the query of Mr. Spencer—“If it is the true self which thinks, what other self can it be that is thought of?” (ibid.) we reply. The true Self is per se, impersonal; the personal or brain-consciousness being but an illusory reflection in incarnated existence. Western Psychology errs in regarding this personal ego as the only factor to be considered in its researches. The argument, therefore, as to the inconceivability of the Subject perceiving itself—which, if—we limit subject to Mind (Manas) is absolutely valid—collapses the moment we assert with Kant and his modern exponents, the existence of a Higher Self or “Transcendental subject.” For, in the act of self-analysis, the Mind becomes in its turn an object to the spiritual consciousness. It is the overshadowing of the Mind by Buddhi which results in the ultimate realization of existence—i.e., self-consciousness in its purest form. But it must at the same time be borne in mind that the full realization of the spiritual Self is impossible for an incarnated 4th Rounder. The Spiritual ego reflects no varying states of consciousness; is independent of all sensation (experience); it does not think—it KNOWS, by an intuitive process only faintly conceivable by the average man. “The subject that perceives” Mind, as an attribute of itself, is this Transcendental or spiritual Ego (Buddhi). He who would know more, let him study Vedanta and Patan͂jali’s Yoga Philosophy—esoterically. Let him understand the real meaning of these sentences: “The knower of SELF passes beyond sorrow” (Chhȃndogya Upanishad, VII, i, 3); and again “he who knows the Supreme Brahman, becomes Brahman” (Mundaka Upanishad, III, ii 9).

It is the “collective aggregate of Ignorance,” as the Vedȃntasȃra puts it, that led to scientific definitions by opponents; as one for instance that we find among the many pearls scattered by Dr. Lewins’ What is Religion. For the beauty and clearness of language, we recommend it; and though its critic (An Examination and Popular Exposition of the Hylo-ldealistic Philosophy, by Wm. Bell McTaggart) recommends likewise the reader to remember that “Dr. Lewins’ philosophy does not lie on the surface” (Preface), yet one may be excused, for insisting on a close scrutiny of a system which aims at supplanting every philosophy, archaic, ancient or non-existent, by Hylo-Idealism, which, it is claimed, is the scientific union of Materialism and Idealism—or that of oil and water; as says the reviewer—“matter, matter, everywhere,” and justly adds of the pure Materialistic and Idealistic hypotheses that “both positions lead to gross—nay unthinkable—absurdities of thought” (p. 3). But what does Dr. Lewins say?

. . . by Hylo-Idealism I mean nothing else than a less ambiguous and self-explanatory form of the term “Psychology” [which term] . . . is the accredited creed of all rational human knowledge, in contradistinction to the occult and morbid mysticism of ontology or metaphysics . . . Psychology is thus relative and phenomenal, the doctrine of life . . . and human knowledge, beginning and ending as anthropomorphosis, and automorphosis, which is quite one with Hylo-Idealism, the rational or cerebral theory of mind and matter. . . Without further preamble, let me state that the Hylozoic theorem of life and the world may be formulated as the utter and self-evident impossibility, in the nature of things, to transcend or escape in any way from the limits of our own anatomy, our own conscious Ego [which is thus made one with anatomy!], the Non-Ego—or, falsely so-called, “external universe”—being but the objective or projective image of our own egoity, not the vera effigies,

or absolute substance, of any “thing” external to self. . . . entities, or non-entities, abstract or concrete, from Divinity downwards, are merely ideal or phenomenal imagery . . . . the essential physical basis, protoplasm, or officina of which is THE VESICULO-NEURINE or grey tissue of the hemispherical ganglia . . .—the function, namely, of a somatic organism, itself fans et origo of all cognition . . . . it seems perfectly clear that, as now mirrored in modern thought, the objective can have no other than a relative existence . . . . This is only, in other words, formulating the solidarité of the Ego and Non-Ego, as psychosis is now diagnosed by medico-psychological symptomatology, as VESICULO NEUROSIS IN ACTIVITY . . . . . [!]

This is the clear and forcible rendering of the last conclusions arrived at by modern thought.

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

The Five-Pointed Star

[The Theosophist, Vol. II, No. 11, August, 1881, pp. 240–241]

[The following comment was written by H. P. Blavatsky on a letter by Mr. S. T. Venkatapaty, who claimed to have successfully used the five-pointed star, drawn on paper with the name of a Hindu god written in the spaces, for healing or mitigating the effect of scorpion bites.]

Of late numerous letters have been received in The Theosophist office concerning the efficacy of the mysterious Pentagram. Our Eastern readers are perhaps unaware of the great importance given by the Western Kabalists to that sign, and, therefore, it may be found expedient to say a few words about it just now, when it is coming so prominently before the notice of our readers. Like the six-pointed star which is the figure of the macrocosm, the five-pointed star has its own deep symbolic significance, for it represents the microcosm. The former—the “double triangle” composed of two triangles respectively white and black—crossed and interlaced (our Society’s symbol)—known as “Solomon’s Seal” in Europe—and as the “Sign of Vishnu” in India—is made to represent the universal spirit and matter, one white point which symbolizes the former ascending heavenward, and the lower point of its black triangle inclining earthward.¹ The Pentagram also represents spirit and matter but only as manifested upon earth. Emblem of the microcosm (or the “little universe”) faithfully mirroring in itself the macrocosm (or the great

¹ The double triangle on the right corner of The Theosophist was by a mistake of the engraver reversed, i.e., placed upside down. So is the Egyptian Tau with the snake coiled round it, in the opposite corner of the title-page cover. The latter double sign when drawn correctly represents the anagram of the Society—a T. S.—and the head of the snake ought to turn the opposite way.

cosmos), it is the sign of the supremacy of human intellect or spirit over brutal matter.

Most of the mysteries of Kabalistic or ceremonial magic, the gnostical symbols and all the Kabalistic keys of prophecy are summed up in that flamboyant Pentagram, considered by the practitioners of the Chaldeo-Jewish Kabala as the most potent magical instrument. In magical evocation during which the slightest hesitation, mistake or omission, becomes fatal to the operator, the star is always on the altar bearing the incense and other offerings, and under the tripod of invocation. According to the position of its points, it “calls forth good or bad spirits, and expels, retains or captures them”—the Kabalists inform us. “Occult qualities are due to the agency of elemental spirits,” says the New American Cyclopaedia in article “Magic,” thus making use of the adjective “Elemental” for certain spirits—a word which, by the by, the spiritualists accused the Theosophists of having coined, whereas the N. A. Cyclopaedia was published twenty years before the birth of the Theosophical Society. “This mysterious figure [the five-pointed star] must be consecrated by the four elements, breathed upon, sprinkled with water, and dried in the smoke of precious perfumes; and then the names of great spirits, as Gabriel, Raphael, Orphiel, and the letters of the sacred tetragram and other Kabalistic words, are whispered to it, and are fantastically inscribed upon it”—adds the Cyclopaedia, copying its information from the books of old Mediaeval Kabalists, and the more modern work of Éliphas Lévi—Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie. A modern London Kabalist, styling himself an “Adept,”—a correspondent in a London Spiritual paper, derides Eastern Theosophy and would—if he could—make it subservient to the Jewish Kabala with its Chaldeo-Phoenician Angelology and Demonology. That

new Cagliostro would probably explain the power and efficacy of the “five-pointed star” by the interference of the good “genii,” evoked by him; those jinns which Solomon-like he has apparently bottled up by sealing the mouth of the vessel with King “Solomon’s Seal” servilely copied by that mythical potentate from the Indian Vaishnava sign, together with other things brought out by him from the no-less mythical Ophir if his vessels ever went there. But the explanation given by the Theosophists for the occasional success obtained in relieving pain (such as scorpion bites) by the application of the Pentagram—a success, by the by, which with the knowledge of the cause producing it might with some persons become permanent and sure—is a little less supernatural, and rejects every theory of “Spirit” agency accomplishing it whether these spirits be claimed human or elemental. True, the five-pointed shape of the star has something to do with it, as will now be explained, but it depends on, and is fully subservient to, the chief agent in the operation, the alpha and the omega of the “magical” force—HUMAN WILL. All the paraphernalia of ceremonial magic—perfumes, vestments, inscribed hieroglyphics and mummeries, are good but for the beginner; the neophyte whose powers have to be developed, his mental attitude during the operations defined, and his WILL educated by concentrating it on such symbols. The Kabalistic axiom that the magician can become the master of the Elemental Spirits only by surpassing them in courage and audacity in their own elements, has an allegorical meaning. It was but to test the moral strength and daring of the candidate that the terrible trials of initiation into ancient mysteries were invented by the hierophants; and hence the neophyte who had proved fearless in water, fire, air and in the terrors of a Cimmerian darkness, was recognized as having become the master of the Undines, the Salamanders, Sylphs and

Gnomes. He had “forced them into obedience,” and “could evoke the spirits” for, having studied and acquainted himself with the ultimate essence of the occult or hidden nature and the respective properties of the Elements, he could produce at will the most wonderful manifestations or “occult” phenomena by the combination of such properties, combinations hitherto unknown to the profane, as progressive and exoteric science, which proceeds slowly and cautiously, can marshal its discoveries but one by one and in their successive order, for hitherto it has scorned to learn from those who had grasped all the mysteries of nature for long ages before. Many are the occult secrets ferreted out by her and wrung from the old magic, and yet it will not give it credit even for that which has been proved to have been known by the ancient esoteric scientists or “Adepts.” But our subject must not be digressed from, and we now turn to the mysterious influence of the Pentagram.

“What is in a sign?” will our readers ask. “No more than in a name” we shall reply—nothing except that, as said above, it helps to concentrate the attention, hence to nail the WILL of the operator to a certain spot. It is the magnetic or mesmeric fluid flowing out of the fingers’ ends of the hand tracing the figure which cures or at least stops the acute pain in benumbing the nerves and not the figure per se. And yet there are some proficients who are able to demonstrate that the five-pointed star, whose points represent the five cordial [sic] limbs or those channels of man—the head, the two arms and the two legs—from whence the mesmeric currents issue the strongest, the simplest tracing of that figure (a tracing produced with far more efficacy with the finger ends than with ink, chalk or pencil), helped by a strong desire to alleviate pain, will very often force out unconsciously the healing fluid from all these extremities, with far more

force than it otherwise would. Faith in the figure is transformed into intense will, and the latter into energy; and energy from whatsoever feeling or cause it may proceed, is sure to rebound somewhere and strike the place with more or less force; and naturally enough that place will be the locality upon which the attention of the operator is at that moment concentrated; and hence—the cure attributed by the self-ignorant mesmeriser to the PENTAGRAM. Truly remarks Schelling that “though magic has generally ceased to be an object of serious attention . . . it has had a history which links it on the one hand with the highest themes of symbolism, theosophy, and early science, as well as on the other with the ridiculous or tragical delusions of the many forms of demonomania. . . . In the Greek mythology the ruins of a superior intelligence and even of a perfect system were to be found, which would reach far beyond the horizon which the most ancient written records present to us . . . and portions of the same system may be discovered in the Jewish cabala. . . .” That “perfect system” is now in the hands of a few proficients in the East. The legitimacy of “Magic” may be disputed by the bigots, its reality as an art, and especially as a science, can scarcely be doubted. Nor is it at all doubted by the whole Roman Catholic Clergy, though their fear of its becoming a terrific witness against the legitimacy of their own ascendancy forces them to support the argument that its marvels are due to malignant spirits or “fallen angels.” In Europe it has still “a few learned and respectable professors and adepts,” admits the same Cyclopaedia. And, throughout the “Pagan” world, we may add, its reality is almost universally admitted and its proficients are numerous, though they try to avoid the attention of the sceptical world.

Love With An Object

[This article appeared originally in Lucifer, Vol. I, p. 391-94, and was republished in Theosophy Magazine, Vol. I, p. 225-28. It does not appear in HPB’s Theosophical Articles, or in Theosophical Articles and Notes. This copy is furnished in order to correct that hiatus. It is credited to H.P.B. due to choice of pseudonym, use of word “be-ness,” and copious documentation within the text—which now appears as endnotes.*]

Some distinguished contributors to theosophical literature have of late been describing what qualities are necessary to constitute a perfect man, i.e., an Adept. They said that among other things it was absolutely and indispensably necessary, that such a being should possess Love—and not merely Love in the abstract—but love regarding some object or objects. What can they possibly mean by speaking of “love with an object,” and could there possibly be love without any object at all? Can that feeling be called love, which is directed solely to the Eternal and Infinite, and takes no cognizance of earthly illusions? Can that be love which has no object or—in other words—is the love of forms or objects the true love at all? If a man loved all things in the universe alike, without giving any preference to any of them, would not such a love be practically without any object; would it not be equal to loving nothing at all; because in such a case the individuality of any single object would be lost to sight?

A love which is directed towards all things alike, an universal love, is beyond the conception of the mortal mind, and yet this kind of love, which bestows no favors upon any one thing, seems to be that eternal love, which is recommended by all the sacred books of the East and the West; because as soon as we begin to love one thing or one being more than another, we not only detract from

* Note: To the editors of this electronic edition, internal evidence suggests that this article may NOT have been written by HPB and the three points of evidence presented here seem quite weak.

the rest an amount of love which the rest may rightfully claim; but we also become attached to the object of our love, a fate against which we are seriously warned in various pages of these books.

The Bhagavad-Gita teaches that we should not love or hate any object of sense whatsoever, nor be attached to any object or thing, but renounce all projects and fix our thoughts solely on It, the Eternal, which is no-thing and no object of cognition for us, but whose presence can be only subjectively experienced by, and within ourselves. It says: “He is esteemed, who is equal-minded to companions, friends, enemies, strangers, neutrals, to aliens and kindred, yea to good and evil men;”¹ and further on it says: “He whose soul is united by devotion, seeing the same in all round, sees the soul in everything and everything in the soul. He who sees Me (Brahmȃ) everywhere and everything in Me, him I forsake not and he forsakes not me. He who sees the same in everything—Arjuna!—whether it be pleasant or grievous, from the self-resemblance, is deemed to be a most excellent Yogin.”²

On almost every page of the Bhagavad-Gita we are instructed only to direct our love to that which is eternal in every form, and let the form itself be a matter of secondary consideration. “He must be regarded as a steadfast renouncer, who neither hates nor desires.” . . . “In a learned and modest Brahman, in a cow, in an elephant, in a dog, and a Swapáka; they who have knowledge see the same thing.” . . . “Let no man rejoice in attaining what is pleasant, nor grieve in attaining what is unpleasant; being fixed in mind, untroubled, knowing Brahmȃ and abiding in Brahmȃ.” . . . “He who is happy in himself, pleased with himself, who finds also light in himself, this Yogin, one with Brahmȃ, finds Nirvana in Him.”

¹ Chapter vi., 14

² Chapter vi., 29, 32

The Great Hermes Trismegistus teaches the same identical doctrine; for he says: “Rise and embrace me with thy whole being, and I will teach thee whatsoever thou desirest to know.” The Bible also tells us that “God is Love,”³ and that we should love Him with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our mind,⁴ and while it teaches that we should love nothing else but God,⁵ who is ALL in ALL,⁶ yet it affirms, that this God is omnipresent, eternal and incomprehensible to the finite understanding of mortals.⁷ It teaches this love to be the most important of all possessions, without which all other possessions are useless,⁸ and yet this God, whom we are to love, is not an “object,”⁹ but everywhere. He is in us and we in Him.¹⁰ We are to leave all objects of sense and follow Him alone,¹¹ although we have no means of intellectually knowing or perceiving Him, the great Unknown, for whose sake we are to give up house and brethren, sisters, father, mother, wife, children and lands.¹²

What can all this mean, but that love itself is the legitimate object of love? It is a divine, eternal, and infinite power, a light, which reflects itself in every object while it seeks not the object, but merely its own reflection therein. It is an indestructible fire and the brighter it burns, the stronger will be the light and the clearer will its own image appear. Love falls in love with nothing but its own self, it is free from all other attractions. A love which becomes attached to objects of sense, ceases to be free, ceases to be love, and becomes mere desire. Pure and eternal love asks for nothing, but gives freely to all who are willing to take. Earthly love is attached to persons and things, but Divine spiritual love seeks only that which is divine in everything, and this can be nothing else but love, for love is the supreme power of all. It holds together the worlds in space, it clothes the earth in bright and beautiful colors, it guides the instincts of

animals and links together the hearts of human beings. Acting upon the lower planes of existence it causes terrestrial things to cling to each other with fond embrace; but love on the spiritual plane is free. Spiritual love is a goddess, who continually sacrifices herself for herself and who accepts no other sacrifice but her own self, giving for whatever she may receive, herself in return. Therefore the Bhagavad-Gita says: “Nourish ye the gods by this and let the gods nourish you. Thus nourishing each other ye shall obtain the highest good;”¹³ and the Bible says: “To him who has still more shall be given, and from him who has not, even what he has shall be taken away.”¹⁴

Love is an universal power and therefore immortal, it can never die. We cannot believe that even the smallest particle of love ever died, only the instruments through which it becomes manifest change their form; nor will it ever be born, for it exists from eternity, only the bodies into which it shines are born and die and are born again. A Love which is not manifest is non-existent for us, to come into existence means to become manifest. How then could we possibly imagine a human being possessed of a love which never becomes manifest; how can we possibly conceive of a light which never shines and of a fire which does not give any heat?

But “as the sun shines upon the lands of the just and the unjust and as the rain descends upon the acres of the evil-minded as well as upon those of the good;” likewise divine love manifesting itself in a perfect man is distributed alike to every one without favor or partiality. Wherever a good and perfect human being exists, there is divine love manifest; and the degree of man’s perfection will depend on the degree of his capacity to serve as an instrument for the manifestation of divine love. The more perfect he is, the more will his love descend upon and

¹³ Chapter iii.

¹⁴ Luke xix., 26

penetrate all who come within his divine influence. To ask favors of God is to conceive of Him as an imperfect being, whose love is not free, but subject to the guidance of, and preference to, mortals. To expect favors of a Mahatma is to conceive him as an imperfect man.

True, “prayer,” i.e., the elevation and aspiration of the soul “in spirit and in truth,”¹⁵ is useful, not because it will persuade the light to come nearer to us, but because it will assist us to open our eyes for the purpose of seeing the light that was already there. Let those who desire to come into contact with the Adepts enter their sphere by following their doctrines; seeking for love, but not for an object of love, and when they have found the former, they will find a super-abundance of the latter throughout the whole extent of the unlimited universe; they will find it in everything that exists, for love is the foundation of all existence and without love nothing can possibly continue to exist.

Love—divine love—is the source of life, of light, and happiness. It is the creative principle in the Macrocosm and in the Microcosm of man. It is Venus, the mother of all the gods, because from her alone originates Will and Imagination and all the other powers by which the universe was evolved. It is the germ of divinity which exists in the heart of man, and which may develop into a life-giving sun, illuminating the mind and sending its rays to the center of the universe; for it originates from that center and to that center it will ultimately return. It is a divine messenger, who carries Light from Heaven down to the Earth and returns again to Heaven loaded with sacrificial gifts.

It is worshiped by all, some adore it in one form and some in another, but many perceive only the form and do

¹⁵ John xiv., 14

not perceive the divine spirit. Nevertheless the spirit alone is real, the form is an illusion. Love can exist without form, but no form can exist without love. It is pure Spirit, but if its light is reflected in matter, it creates desire and desire is the producer of forms. Thus the visible world of perishable things is created. “But above this visible nature there exists another, unseen and eternal, which, when all created things perish, does not perish,”¹⁶ and “from which they who attain to it never return.” This is the supreme abode of Love without any object, unmanifested and imperishable, for there no object exists. There love is united to love, enjoying supreme and eternal happiness within her own self and that peace, of which the mortal mind, captivated by the illusion of form, cannot conceive. Non-existent for us, and yet existing in that Supreme Be-ness, in which all things dwell, by which the universe has been spread out, and which may be attained to by an exclusive devotion.

— Emanuel

¹⁶ Bhagavad Gita viii., 20

What is Theosophy?

By a PARAMAHANSA OF THE HIMALAYAS¹

1. Theosophy is that branch of human perfection, by which one may establish himself with the eternal cause of invisible nature; to which this physical effect is a bubble.
2. Theosophy is that knowledge which leads one from animalism to Divinity.
3. Theosophy is that branch of human philosophy, which theoretically teaches one what he really is beyond mind and personal individuality (Ego).
4. Theosophy is that branch of chemistry, by which one begets IMMORTALITY.
5. Theosophy is that branch of painting (one’s self) which Time cannot efface.
6. Theosophy is that branch of husbandry (agriculture) by which one may preserve the seed without rearing the tree.
7. Theosophy is that branch of optics, which magnifies one’s view to see beyond physical nature.
8. Theosophy is that branch of human surgery, which separates physical nature from the spiritual.

¹ Paramahansas are the order of the highest Yogi-Sannyasis, who alone are allowed to throw off the yoke of the Hindu caste superstitions. While all the others have to perform, more or less the daily exoteric ceremonies of their respective Ashrums or orders, no rules of action can be assigned to these. — ED. [HPB]

1. Theosophy is that branch of Masonry, which shows the universe in an egg.
2. Theosophy is that branch of music, which harmonizes physical nature with spirit.
3. Theosophy is that part of gardening, which teaches one how to rear trees out of charcoal.
4. Theosophy is that branch of sanitation, which teaches one how to purify nature by means of cause and effect.
5. Theosophy is that branch of engineering, which bridges the gulf between life and death.
6. Theosophy is that warlike art, which teaches one how to subdue (subjugate) time and death, the two mightiest foes of man.
7. Theosophy is that food, which enables one to taste the most exquisite sweetness in his own self.
8. Theosophy is that branch of navigation, which teaches one the starting point and the final goal of human life.
9. Theosophy is that branch of commerce, which makes one fit to select unerringly the commodities for both lives.
10. Theosophy is that branch of politics, which unites past and future into one present, and establishes peace with the most tumultuous off-shoots of debased nature.
11. Theosophy is that branch of mineralogy, by which one may discover the source of eternal wealth, combining life, knowledge and eternal joy into one.

1. Theosophy is that branch of astronomy, which proves that spirit is the only fixed star which sets not throughout the revolutions of nature.
2. Theosophy is that branch of gymnastics, which invigorates the mind, expands the intellect, unites the thoughts with the tie of breath,¹ removes the heat of lust, and produces a balmy calmness, which is the heart’s eye, to penetrate the mysteries of nature.
3. Theosophy is that branch of mental philosophy, by which one may know the exact centre of his individual Self and its identity with the entity of the second principle of the Vedantists, or the seventh one of the present Theosophists,² or what is commonly known by the name, God.
4. Theosophy is that branch of medicine by which one may rid himself of his sins from time immemorial.
5. Theosophy is that branch of natural philosophy, by which one may watch and witness nature in her birth—chastity—adultery and the present old age.
6. Theosophy is that occult branch of the Christian church, on which the groundwork of that church was originally planned,—i.e., the essential nondifference of God with the individual witness.
7. Theosophy is that branch of Christianity, which eliminates the spiritual Christ from the corporeal one of the orthodox generation.

¹ This relates to occult practices. — ED. [HPB]

² Jivatma, in the sense of the Vedantin, is the Soul of all life, and in that of the Theosophists it is Jiva—vital principle. — ED. Theosophist.

1. Theosophy is that part of the Christian theology, which shows that the present churches of the West are abusing the Bible by misinterpretations.
2. Theosophy is that part of the Aryan independence, by which one may exist without the help of nature.
3. Theosophy (to be brief) is the sum total of the wisdom of the Aryan Brahmȃ—the happiness eternal—and the life everlasting. It is Theosophy which taught the Aryans how to soar far beyond the region of Shȃkti and to be in perpetual joy—(the play-ground of Shȃkti). In short, it is the basis of all the knowledge that exists in the eternity.

THE THEOSOPHIST, VOL. III, AUG. 1882, p. 273

Erroneous Ideas Concerning The Doctrines of the Theosophists

[La Revue Spirite, Paris, January, 1879]

[Translation from Blavatsky: Collected Works, vol. ii, p. 14-24]

We insert this reply to Monsieur Rossi de Justiniani, but we express no opinion upon the doctrines expounded therein; our Smyrna brother may reply to Mme. H. P. Blavatsky. [Editor.]

“Criticism is easy; art is difficult!”

—Destouches, Philinte, I D, Act II, sc. 5.

The Theosophical Society of New York, founded in 1875, and later, according to the orders of its heads in India, entirely reconstructed, is established on the plan of every secret society. It is plain, then, that its doctrines cannot be common property. In spite of that, the American Press—above all the Spiritualistic papers—have incessantly dissected, criticized and turned them into ridicule, invariably setting up as doctrines of the Theosophists what are nothing but conjectures on their own part. The little that it was permissible to reveal to them, however, was done as clearly as is possible in the English language, which is rather poorly adapted to the expression of metaphysical ideas.

Mirabile dictu! Not only did they turn a deaf ear to our explanations, but as soon as the criticisms of our opponents began to be crushed, the doors of the papers were politely shut in our faces!

It is indeed time, in this blindman’s buff polemic, to throw a little daylight into this Cimmerian darkness

where the light often has been extinguished—one would almost say by design. A criticism on “The Elementaries and the Elemental,” published in the August number of La Revue Spirite, offers us an opportunity.

Yes, “for the New York Theosophists, man is a trinity and not a duality.” But he is more than that, however; by adding the physical body, man is a Tetraktys, or quaternity. But, supported as we are in this particular doctrine by the greatest philosophers of ancient Greece—as the author of the article remarks—it is neither to Pythagoras, nor Plato, nor the famous Theodidaktoi of the Alexandrian School, that we owe it. We will speak of our own teachers later on. We will first prove that the critic in La Revue Spirite strays from the facts in his article, concerning all that relates to the historical doctrines of antiquity, and that—quite innocently no doubt, and, as the result of judging only from abridged translations he disfigures ours.

First of all, he is deceived—according to us—when, believing himself to be correcting our notions, and having a moment before treated of “incarnated souls” (p. 291), he speaks (p. 292) of a “plastic and unconscious mediator, or the périsprital fluid that serves to envelope the spirit.” Does he consider then, that the spirit and the soul are identical, or that the former can be incarnated like the soul? A strange mistake in our eyes! And if that plastic mediator is “unconscious,” according to the writer, in that case, the soul also, which he thinks immortal, and even the spirit, must be so, because further on we find him establishing the exact identity of the spirit and the soul. “The soul, isolated, is for us the périsprit,” he says. We will ask, first, how can it be that anything “unconscious”—hence, irresponsible—can be, in a future life, either rewarded or punished for acts committed during an unconscious state? Later on,

towards the close of the article, the author tells us that, in an imperfect being, the third element, or the Spirit, cannot be annihilated, but for an indefinite period loses the consciousness of its greatness and may be degraded to the level of the brute. Here we completely fail to understand him! We do not know if these ideas are personal to the author or rather the expression of the teaching of the orthodox spiritists in general.¹ No matter; for us they are monstrous and incomprehensible. How can the spirit, the supreme primordial essence, the uncreated and eternal monad, the direct spark from the “central Sun” of the Kabalists, be no more than a third element, as fallible as the périsprit? Can it, like the vital soul—afflicted with a chronic unconsciousness, it would appear—become unconscious also, be it but temporarily? Can the immortal Spirit “be degraded to the level of a beast”? Nonsense! the author cannot have the least notion of our teachings; either he is ignorant of what we call “spirit,” because for him the spirit and the soul are synonymous—or rather, he is still more iconoclastic than ourselves. We hasten to repudiate those ideas. We have never professed anything like them.

Plato is quoted to us and, at the same time, what Plato taught is forgotten. According to the “divine” philosopher the soul is dual; it is composed of two primitive constituent parts: one—mortal, the other eternal; the former, fashioned by the created gods (the creative and intelligent forces in nature), the other, an emanation from the supreme Spirit. He tells us that the mortal soul, in taking possession of its body, becomes “irrational”; but between irrationality and unconsciousness there is a profound difference. Plato, finally, never confused the périsprit with the soul or the spirit. In

¹ There are no orthodox spiritists but simply researchers, investigators who accept every demonstrated truth [Editor].

common with every other philosopher, he called it neither the nous nor ψυχή, but gave it the name εϊδωλου, sometimes that of imago or simulacrum.

Let us try, then, to re-establish a little order in this confusion. Let us give everything its true name, and state precisely the difference between the opinions of our learned critic and our own. For all who have studied the Greek philosophers, it is clear that the author confuses terms. His question (p. 292), “Can the separation of the spirit, ψυχή, from the soul, nous or périsprit, ever be the cause of a complete destruction . . .?” provides us with the key to the misunderstanding. He translates the words “spirit” and “soul” simply vice versa.

We do not know if the modern Greeks so translate those two nouns, but we are able to prove that none of the ancient philosophers have ever defined them in that way. We will allow ourselves to quote two names, but those will suffice. Our pagan authority is—Plutarch; our Christian authority is no more and no less than Saint James, “the brother of the Lord.” In treating of the soul Plutarch tells us that while ψυχή is imprisoned in the body, the nous or the divine intelligence soars above mortal man, shedding upon him a ray that is more or less luminous according to the personal merit of the man; he adds that the nous never descends but remains stationary. Saint James is still more explicit. Speaking of the wisdom from below (vide the Greek text, General Epistle, iii, 15) he treats it as “terrestrial, sensual, psychic,” this last adjective being translated in the English text by the word “diabolical,” and (iii, 17) he adds that it is only the wisdom from above that is divine and “noetic” (adj. of the sub. nous). So the psychic element never seems to have been in the odor of sanctity, either with the Saints of Christianity or with the Philosophers of Paganism. Since

Saint James treats ψυχή as diabolical and Plato makes something irrational of it, can it be immortal per se?

May we be allowed a comparison, the best we can find, between the concrete and the abstract; between what our critic calls “the triple hypostasis” and we “the tetraktys”? Let us compare this philosophic quaternary, composed of the body, the périsprit, the soul and the spirit—to the ether—so well foreseen by science, but never defined—and its subsequent correlations. The ether will represent the spirit for us; the dead vapor that is formed therein—the soul; water—the périsprit; ice—the body. The ice melts and for ever loses its shape, water evaporates and is dispersed in space; the vapor is liberated from its grosser particles and finally reaches that condition in which science cannot follow it. Purified from its last defilements, it is entirely absorbed into its first cause, and becomes a cause in its turn. With the exception of the immortal nous—the soul, the périsprit and the body, all having been created and having had a beginning, must all have an end.

Does that mean that the individuality is lost in that absorption? Not at all. But between the human Ego and the wholly divine Ego, there is an abyss that our critics fill in without knowing it. As to the périsprit, it is no more the soul than the delicate skin that surrounds the almond is the kernel itself or even its temporary husk. The perisprit is but the simulacrum of the man.

It follows that Theosophists understand the hypostasis, according to the old philosophers, in a very different way from the Spiritualists. For us, the Spirit is the personal god of each mortal, and his only divine element. The dual soul, on the contrary, is only semidivine. Being a direct emanation from the nous, everything it has of immortal essence, once its earthly

cycle is accomplished, must necessarily return to its mother-source, and as pure as when it was detached; it is that purely spiritual essence which the primitive church, as faithful as it was rebellious to the Neo-Platonic traditions, thought it recognized in the good daïmon and made into a guardian angel; at the same time justly blighting the “irrational” and fallible soul, the real human Ego (from which we get the word Egoism), she called it the angel of darkness, and afterwards made it into a personal devil. The only error was in anthropomorphizing it and in making it a monster with tail and horns. Otherwise, abstraction as it may be, this devil is truly personal because it is identical with our Ego. It is this, the elusive and inaccessible personality, that ascetics of every country think they chastise by mortifying the flesh. The Ego then, to which we concede only a conditional immortality, is the purely human individuality. Half vital energy, half an aggregation of personal qualities and attributes, necessary to the constitution of every human being as distinct from his neighbor, the Ego is only the “breath of life” that Jehovah, one of the Elohim or creative gods, breathed into the nostrils of Adam; and, as such, and apart from its higher intelligence, it is but the element of individuality possessed by man in common with every creature, from the gnat that dances in the rays of the sun to the elephant, the king of the forest. It is only by identifying itself with that divine intelligence that the Ego, soiled with earthly impurities, can win its immortality.

In order to express our thought more clearly, we will proceed by a question. Though matter may be quite indestructible in its primitive atoms—indestructible, because, as we say, it is the eternal shadow of the eternal Light and co-exists with it—can this matter remain unchangeable in its temporary forms or correlations? Do

we not see it, during its ceaseless modifications, destroy today what it created yesterday? Every form, whether it belongs to the objective world or to that which our intelligence alone can perceive, having had a beginning, must have an end. There was a time when it did not exist; there will come a day when it will cease to be. Now, modern science tells us that even our thought is material. However fleeting an idea may be, its conception and its subsequent evolutions require a certain consumption of energy; let the least cerebral motion reverberate in the ether of space and it will produce a disturbance reaching to infinity. Hence, it is a material force, although invisible.

And, if that is so, who would dare to affirm that man, whose individuality is composed of thoughts, of desires and selfish passions, which are peculiar to him, and which make him an individual sui generis, can live in eternity with all his distinctive traits, without changing?

And if he changes during infinite cycles, what remains of him? What becomes of that separate individuality that is so much prized? It is only logical to believe that a person who already on earth, forgetting his precious self, was ever ready to sacrifice himself for the welfare of others; who, in his love for humanity, has made himself useful in the present life and necessary in the future life, for the great and ceaseless work of Creation, of Preservation and of Regeneration; and who finally, aspiring to the infinite and striving to progress morally, individualizes himself with the essence of his divine intelligence, and is, thus, forced into the current of immortality—it is but logical, we say, to believe that he will live in spirit eternally. But that another person who, during his probationary exile on earth envisaged life but as a long series of selfish actions, who was as useless to himself as to others, and pernicious as an example—

should be immortal like the former—is impossible for us to believe! Nothing is stationary in nature; everything must advance or fall back, and an incurable drunkard, a debauchee wholly immersed in materiality, having never made the least effort towards the good, dead or living, will never make progress! He will have to submit to his fate, even his divine soul not being able to save him. The Ego, or terrestrial psychȇ, has free will, and, moreover, the mysterious counsel of its guardian here on earth, which speaks through the voice of conscience. Being unable to follow the brutalized man in his rapid descent toward the abyss of materiality—the man who is deaf to his conscience, blind to the light, and who has lost the power of raising himself towards it—the Divine Essence, like the guardian angel of the naïve woodcuts of our childhood, spreads its white wings and, breaking the last link between them, re-ascends towards its own realms. Can the purely material individuality live in the world of spirits if abandoned to the laws of matter alone? We say no; no more than a fish can live outside its natural element. Laws are universal and immutable.¹

“That which is above is like that which is below,” said the great Hermes. The newborn child cannot live if it lacks vital force, and dies without having seen the light; neither will the ego, entirely deprived of spiritual force, have the strength to be born or to exist in the region of spirits. If it is only weak and withered—it may survive—“as it is on earth, so it is in heaven.” But, it will be said, the evil souls do not remain unpunished. Ages, thousands of ages, perhaps, of suffering are surely a sufficient punishment. We say that such a punishment would be at the same time too much and hardly enough. It would be disproportionate even to the greatest crimes

¹ This should be meditated upon and discussed [Editor].

committed throughout the whole of a long human life; it would be diabolical and unjust. On the other hand, with eternity before the suffering soul, and an absolutely certain eternity, such a punishment would be merely a bad joke. What are thousands of ages in infinity! Less than the wink of the eye.

It may be that this teaching—like every other plain truth—seems repulsive to many people. As for us, we believe it. Sentimentality has no place in our ranks; he who does not feel ready to sacrifice his dearest personal hopes to the eternal truth may become a member of the Theosophical Society, but will never belong to our Esoteric Circle. Without forcing our opinions on anyone, we respect those of others without sharing them. And yet our Society reckons thousands of Europeans and Americans in its ranks.

It is said that this doctrine of conditional immortality was circulated among the masses only “to terrify low and depraved souls.” Still another error. It has never been a popular doctrine; either in India, Greece or Egypt. Its proofs were given only to the neophyte, during the great Mysteries, when a sacred beverage enabled him to leave his body and, soaring in the infinity of worlds, observe and judge for himself. To divulge what he then saw was certain death; and terrible were the oaths that were demanded of him, at the supreme Epopteïa when the grand Hierophant offered him the Petroma, or stone tablets on which were engraved the secrets of initiation. Plato alone spoke of it, in veiled terms, but he did speak of it. If in one sense he said that the soul is immortal, in another he positively denied that each individual soul had pre-existed or that it will exist afterwards and for eternity. The same thing was taught in every sanctuary. Modern Egyptologists have all the proofs of it. Mariette-Bey translated several passages in

the Book of the Dead and from inscriptions in sarcophagi where conditional immortality and complete annihilation are in store for the wicked. One hymn to Osiris says of the defunct: “He sees by Thee, he lives in Thee and it is only by Thee that he can escape annihilation.” The Egyptians taught the masses that the animal soul, belonging to the body and independent of the immortal soul, would not rejoin it until after a certain lapse of time passed in the mummy. But to the initiate, they said that complete annihilation awaited the depraved souls which had not succeeded in becoming Osirified or Divine. F. Lenormant declares this, as also does Mariette-Bey. Gotama, the Hindu philosopher, says in his Nyȃya-Sȗtra (Tarkalamkara): “The seat of the knowledge of the self (or individuality) is in the human soul (jȋvȃtman), which is dual, but the supreme soul (paramȃtman) is the only one that is omniscient, infinite and eternal.”

To finish with the question, the objection is brought against us that those who have faith in immortality as a general law, regard our opinions as “in every respect contrary to divine justice.” We answer: “What do you know of that justice? Upon what do you base your ideas in supposing that the laws of the invisible world are any different from those of this world, entirely laying aside the well-established scientific law of the survival of the fittest, which would certainly be of no small consequence in our argument?” We ask only for valid proofs in support of the contrary. Possibly we may be told that it would perhaps, be as difficult for us to prove the truth of our doctrines as for our critics to prove theirs. Agreed! We instantly confess that, in believing them, we know only what we have been taught. But our teaching rests at least on philosophy and on experimental psychology (such as that of the system of the Hindu Yogis), results of long ages of research. Our Masters are Patan͂jali, Kapila, Kanȃda, all the systems and schools of Ȃryȃvarta (archaic

India) which served as inexhaustible mines for the Greek philosophers, from Pythagoras to Proclus. It is based on the esoteric wisdom of ancient Egypt, where Moses, like Plato, went to learn from the Hierophants and Adepts; it was therefore developed by sure methods that do not proceed by inference, but decide by strict analogy alone, are based on the immutability of universal laws, and proceed by induction. May we be allowed to ask our opponents to show us their authority? Is it modern science? But learned science laughs at you as it does at us. Is it the Mosaic Bible? We doubt it because it does not breathe a word of it, and in spite of all the tortures applied to its text during long centuries of research, and notwithstanding all its revised and corrected editions, remains mute on the subject. But in several places, touching upon the survival of the soul, it cuts the ground under our feet. In Ecclesiastes (iii, 19) the Bible gives man no preeminence at all over the brute; as the one perishes, so does the other, for the breath that animates them both is the same. As to Job, that illustrious sufferer declares to us that man, once dead “disappears like a shadow, and—continues no more” (Job, xiv, 2). Is it the New Testament? That book offers the choice between a philharmonic paradise and a hell which is far from being a real one. It gives us no irrefutable proof, it prohibits us from reasoning, and insists upon blind faith. Is it the phenomena of Spiritualism? Here we are! Now we are on firm ground, for the proofs are palpable, and it is “spirits” who are our teachers. Theosophists believe in the manifestations and in the “spirits” as much as the Spiritualists. But—when you have finished demonstrating to the whole world, including skeptical science, that our phenomena are produced by the souls of the departed—what will you have proved? The survival of man at the utmost; his immortality you will never prove; neither as a general law nor “as a conditional reward.” Thirty years of experience with the “spirits” have not

given us an impression in favor of their veracity as a “general law”; you have nothing more, then, to confute us than your blind faith, your emotions, and the instinct of a minority of humanity. Yes, a minority, for when you have set aside the 450 millions of Buddhists, who do not believe in immortality and dread as a terrible calamity even the survival of the soul; and the 200 millions of Hindus of all sects, who believe in absorption into the primordial essence, what remains of this universal doctrine?

Our doctrine, you say, “was invented for low and vulgar souls.” We are in a position to prove to you, statistics in hand, that these “low and vulgar” souls predominate in the civilized and Christian countries where immortality is promised to everyone. We refer you to America, puritanic and pious, which promises every criminal it hangs an eternal Paradise, if he will believe; and that immediately, because, according to the Protestants, there is less than one step from the foot of the scaffold to the foot of the Eternal. Open a New York paper; you will find the first page entirely covered with news of the most atrocious, the most unheard-of crimes committed by the dozen, every day, and from one end of the year to the other. We challenge anyone to find anything like it in pagan countries, where people do not trouble themselves at all about immortality, and where they ask only to be absorbed forever. Is immortality then, as a “general law,” rather a stimulant to, than a preventive against, crime for every “low and vulgar” soul?

We close believing that we have answered all the accusations of the author of the article on “The Elementaries.”

If our teachings interest the reader we will try to be more explicit in a future number.

H. P. Blavatsky.