1,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
The Collected Works of Helena Blavatsky presents a comprehensive anthology of the influential writings of one of the founding figures of modern esotericism. Blavatsky's literary style is characterized by its intricate prose, rich symbolism, and profound philosophical musings, exploring themes of ancient wisdom, spirituality, and the interrelation of science and religion. Amidst the Victorian context, she engages with Eastern philosophies and incorporates them into a Western literary framework, revealing her intent to bridge cultural divides and encourage a deeper understanding of the human experience. Helena Blavatsky, a Russian mystic and co-founder of the Theosophical Society, draws upon her extensive travels, mystical experiences, and engagement with diverse spiritual traditions to shape her message. Her unique background and fervent idealism inspired her lifelong dedication to advocating for the synthesis of science, religion, and philosophy, as demonstrated in this extensive collection. Blavatsky's work has profoundly influenced various spiritual and philosophical movements, cementing her legacy as a pivotal figure in the Western esoteric tradition. For readers interested in spiritual exploration and the confluence of diverse traditions, The Collected Works of Helena Blavatsky serves not only as a foundational text but also as a remarkable journey into the depths of metaphysical inquiry. This anthology is a must-read for those seeking insight into the complexities of human consciousness and the pursuit of universal truth. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
Ähnliche
The Collected Works of Helena Blavatsky
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection brings together the principal writings of Helena Blavatsky, presenting a coherent view of the ideas that shaped the modern Theosophical movement. It gathers Isis Unveiled (Volumes 1–2), The Secret Doctrine (Volumes 1–3), The Key to Theosophy, The Voice of the Silence, Studies in Occultism, From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan, and Nightmare Tales. Composed in the late nineteenth century, these works seek to synthesize perspectives across religion, philosophy, and science while exploring the ethical and spiritual implications of that synthesis. The result is a comprehensive single-author corpus that allows readers to follow a sustained inquiry across multiple forms and audiences.
The volumes assembled here encompass an unusual breadth of genres and text types. They include large-scale comparative studies, doctrinal compendia, instructional dialogues, aphoristic spiritual counsel, essays, travel writing, and short fiction. Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine are expansive scholarly treatises; The Key to Theosophy adopts a question-and-answer format; The Voice of the Silence offers condensed spiritual guidance in concentrated prose; Studies in Occultism gathers essays for students; From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan presents literary travel sketches; and Nightmare Tales collects supernatural short stories. Together, these modes allow Blavatsky to argue, elucidate, exemplify, and dramatize her themes from complementary angles.
The overarching purpose of these writings is to articulate a modern presentation of what Blavatsky framed as an ancient, universal wisdom tradition. Her method is comparative and synthetic: she juxtaposes sources from diverse cultures, reads symbols across traditions, and tests claims against both reasoned argument and experiential assertions. Although addressed to different readerships, the works share a didactic intention, introducing ideas, supplying contexts, and proposing paths of study and conduct. They also intervene in contemporary debates of their time, disputing narrow materialism and sectarian dogmatism, and urging a broader horizon for inquiry in which metaphysics, ethics, and empiricism can be considered in relation rather than isolation.
Isis Unveiled, issued in two volumes, frames Blavatsky’s initial wide-ranging critique and synthesis. It surveys religious doctrines and scientific ideas, arguing that both contain partial insights when severed from a wider philosophical perspective. The work’s tone is polemical and energetic, its scope encyclopedic. It assembles a formidable apparatus of citations and comparisons to make a case for an underlying, often overlooked continuity in human wisdom. Readers will encounter a blend of argumentative chapters, historical discussion, and expository passages that aim to correct misreadings, highlight forgotten contexts, and recover neglected patterns of thought, thereby laying the groundwork for the more systematized exposition that follows.
The Secret Doctrine, presented here in three volumes as commonly published, consolidates Blavatsky’s doctrinal exposition. It advances an architecture of ideas concerning cosmological processes, human origins, and spiritual development, read through symbols, cycles, and correspondences. The first volumes establish the framework and commentary; the third brings together related and supporting material as it appears in collected editions. The style integrates layered commentary with references to traditional sources and contemporary discussions, inviting readers to consider texts both literally and symbolically. Its ambition is synthetic: to place science, religion, and philosophy in a shared interpretive field and to trace the implications of that alignment.
The Key to Theosophy addresses practical questions in a plainspoken, dialogic manner. Organized in an accessible question-and-answer format, it clarifies terminology, principles, and ethical applications for newcomers and consolidates core points for committed students. It explains central topics frequently associated with the Theosophical movement, outlines ideas about study and discipline, and responds to common misunderstandings. Its pedagogy relies on cumulative definition and careful distinction, favoring clarity over polemic. In the context of this collection, it serves as a bridge between the vast treatises and the more concise instructional and reflective writings, enabling readers to orient themselves within a dense conceptual landscape.
The Voice of the Silence, presented as translated fragments selected by Blavatsky, distills spiritual counsel into concentrated prose. Its tone is meditative and exhortatory, speaking to interior discipline, compassion, and the responsibilities entailed by study. The writing employs aphoristic compression and metaphor, encouraging prolonged contemplation rather than rapid consumption. It complements the argumentative works by offering a compact manual of attitude and practice, balancing intellectual emphasis with interior cultivation. Many readers have used it as a companion for reflective reading, finding in its cadences a counterpoint to the expansive arguments of the larger volumes while remaining aligned with their ethical orientation.
Studies in Occultism gathers essays that address practical, ethical, and methodological dimensions of esoteric study. The pieces clarify terms, respond to public queries, and outline precautions, with a recurring emphasis on motive, discipline, and responsibility. They often revisit issues introduced elsewhere, but in a shorter, topical form suited to periodical publication. Stylistically, the essays are direct and occasionally corrective, aiming to dispel sensationalism and to distinguish serious inquiry from credulity. Within this collection, they function as a flexible toolkit, translating overarching principles into guidance for students and readers who seek to understand the implications of the doctrines for study and conduct.
From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan offers a series of literary travel sketches set primarily in India. First appearing in Russian, these pieces blend observation, anecdote, and reflective commentary, often adopting a narrative flair that brings scenes and interlocutors vividly to life. While engaging as travel writing, the sketches also serve as a cultural mediation, exploring encounters, customs, and ideas within a comparative frame. They complement the doctrinal works by illustrating the author’s curiosity, capacity for portraiture, and sense of the complexity of cross-cultural exchange, while also revealing how narrative can introduce, test, and exemplify concepts outside strictly theoretical exposition.
Nightmare Tales collects short stories that use the resources of the supernatural tale to dramatize ethical and metaphysical themes. The narratives explore consequences, choice, and perception, often placing characters in situations that suggest unseen causal threads. Rather than offering doctrine in summary, the stories create atmospheres of ambiguity and moral pressure, allowing ideas to be felt as much as understood. Their tone ranges from somber to sardonic, with occasional touches of folklore and allegory. In the context of the whole, they demonstrate how imaginative literature can complement expository writing by engaging the emotions and imagination alongside reasoned argument.
Throughout these works, unifying themes recur: a search for a universal substratum in religious symbolism; a conviction that ethical transformation is inseparable from knowledge; and a sustained effort to hold science, religion, and philosophy in a mutually illuminating relation. Stylistically, Blavatsky alternates between polemic and pedagogy, elaborate citation and pointed assertion, cumulative argument and meditative condensation. She reads myths and symbols not as curiosities but as vehicles of meaning, inviting comparative analysis. The appeal endures because the corpus provides an ambitious framework for inquiry, a vocabulary for discussing interior life and cosmological scope together, and a challenge to reductionism in any single domain.
Taken as a whole, this collection presents a complete cross-section of Blavatsky’s public work: doctrinal syntheses, instructional handbooks, reflective counsel, essays, travel writing, and fiction. It offers readers multiple points of entry, whether through systematic study, practical orientation, contemplative reading, or narrative exploration. The works remain significant for their historical role in the evolution of modern esotericism and for their ongoing capacity to catalyze comparative study across traditions. They invite careful, critical reading, attention to sources and contexts, and a willingness to inhabit both argument and symbol. Approached in that spirit, they reveal a coherent intellectual and ethical project with lasting resonance.
Author Biography
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891) was a Russian-born writer and co-founder of the Theosophical Society, a pivotal figure in the late nineteenth-century occult revival. Her work sought to synthesize Eastern and Western religious and philosophical traditions, arguing for a perennial wisdom underlying them all. Through books, journals, and organizational leadership, she helped introduce concepts such as karma, reincarnation, and esoteric cosmology to broad audiences in Europe and the United States. Admired by followers as a transmitter of ancient teachings and criticized by detractors as a controversial mystic, she exerted a lasting influence on alternative spirituality, comparative religion, and the emergence of modern occult and New Age currents.
Raised in the Russian Empire, Blavatsky received a conventional education for her social milieu, studying languages, music, and literature, and developed a voracious, largely self-directed reading habit. As a young adult she traveled widely—across parts of Europe, the Near East, and later the Americas—encountering Spiritualism and contemporary occult currents. She was drawn to Neoplatonic, Hermetic, and Rosicrucian writings, while increasingly engaging with Hindu and Buddhist philosophies through translations and conversations with scholars and practitioners. She claimed guidance from seasoned adepts and periods of study in Asia, assertions that became central to her narrative and to Theosophy, though historians have debated elements of these accounts. The blend of scholarship and visionary claims shaped her voice.
In the mid-1870s, after periods in the United States, Blavatsky emerged publicly as a defender of Spiritualism while insisting on a philosophic framework deeper than séance phenomena. In 1875 she co-founded the Theosophical Society in New York with Henry Steel Olcott and William Q. Judge. The Society articulated aims that proved enduring: to form a nucleus of universal brotherhood without distinctions; to encourage the comparative study of religion, philosophy, and science; and to investigate unexplained laws of nature and latent human capacities. This organizational platform gave Blavatsky a base for publishing, lecturing, and corresponding with an expanding international network of seekers and reformers.
Her first major book, Isis Unveiled (1877), presented a sweeping critique of both dogmatic theology and reductive materialism, proposing an esoteric tradition connecting antiquity to modern times. The book attracted wide attention, praise for its audacity and erudition, and criticism for alleged errors and borrowings. In 1879 she and Olcott relocated to India, where they launched the monthly journal The Theosophist and established new branches. From bases in Bombay and later Adyar, they promoted study of Sanskrit and Pali texts, fostered dialogue with Hindu and Buddhist reformers, and framed Theosophy as a cross-cultural inquiry rather than a creed, energizing debates about religion and modernity in South Asia.
The Indian years also brought fierce controversy. In the mid-1880s the so-called Coulomb affair involved accusations of trickery at the Society’s headquarters, followed by an investigation by the Society for Psychical Research that concluded she had produced fraudulent phenomena. The Hodgson Report damaged her reputation in scientific and journalistic circles, although later commentators criticized its methods and some of its findings. Amid illness and strain, she left India and continued her work in Europe. Throughout, she insisted that Theosophy rested on philosophical and ethical principles, not on manifestations, and continued to write articles and guide students who sought a rigorous, comparative approach to esoteric ideas.
Settling in London in the late 1880s, Blavatsky entered her most productive literary period. The Secret Doctrine (1888), widely regarded as her magnum opus, elaborated a vast cosmology and human evolution within cycles, drawing on what she presented as archaic stanzas and a broad array of sources. She followed with The Key to Theosophy (1889), a clear, catechistic exposition of ideas such as karma, reincarnation, and ethical self-culture, and The Voice of the Silence (1889), a concise book of spiritual counsel she said was adapted from Eastern texts. She helped establish the Blavatsky Lodge and co-founded the journal Lucifer, consolidating a community of students around advanced study.
Blavatsky died in London in 1891, leaving a movement that soon developed multiple lines of leadership but retained her core emphases on universal brotherhood and disciplined inquiry. Her writings continued in print and influenced twentieth-century esotericism, comparative religion, and aspects of modernist culture. Scholars debate her sources, methods, and claims, yet many acknowledge her role in reshaping Western reception of Asian philosophies and in articulating a program that linked metaphysics to ethical reform. Read today, Isis Unveiled, The Secret Doctrine, and her late manuals are approached both as historical artifacts of a globalizing era and as touchstones for readers exploring syncretic spiritual frameworks.
Historical Context
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, born 12 August 1831 in Yekaterinoslav, Russian Empire (now Dnipro, Ukraine), wrote in an era stretching from late Romanticism into the industrial and imperial high tide of the nineteenth century. Raised in a multilingual, aristocratic milieu, she traveled widely from 1849 onward, claiming journeys through the Near East, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Her death in London on 8 May 1891 capped a career that moved between St Petersburg, New York, Bombay, Adyar, and European capitals. The global ambit of her life shaped all her books, from Isis Unveiled to The Secret Doctrine, The Key to Theosophy, The Voice of the Silence, and later collections.
Blavatsky’s oeuvre emerged within European currents that joined Romantic fascination with the Orient to positivist science and industrial capitalism. Debates about the soul, causality, and invisible forces traversed mesmerism, magnetism, and psychophysiology, while occult thinkers like Eliphas Levi and popular novelists such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton framed esoteric revival in Paris and London. Simultaneously, philologists led by F Max Muller opened Eastern literatures to the West. These intertwined discourses created a space in which comparative mythology, Hermeticism, and Orientalist scholarship could be synthesized. Blavatsky’s major works positioned themselves at this crossroads, arguing for ancient wisdom traditions while engaging, and contesting, modern science and biblical criticism.
In the United States, modern spiritualism exploded after the Fox sisters in 1848, producing newspapers, lecture circuits, and séances scrutinized by scientists and skeptics alike. Blavatsky arrived in New York in 1873 and visited the Eddy farmhouse in Chittenden, Vermont, in 1874, where she met Henry Steel Olcott. Along with William Quan Judge and others, they founded the Theosophical Society in New York City on 17 November 1875. This American crucible linked her writings to a democratic print culture, voluntary associations, and debates over mediumship and psychical phenomena, contexts that shaped both the polemical tone of Isis Unveiled and the programmatic goals of her later books.
Isis Unveiled, published in New York by J W Bouton in 1877 in two volumes, entered a public sphere contested by Darwinian evolution, biblical higher criticism, and scientific naturalism. By assembling vast quotations from antiquity to Renaissance occultism and modern science, Blavatsky sought to defend an ancient wisdom tradition against both ecclesiastical dogma and materialist reduction. The book’s patchwork method, controversial citations, and sweeping claims foreshadowed the encyclopedic reach of The Secret Doctrine. It also embedded her project inside the transatlantic press, where spiritualist journalism, freethought periodicals, and new professional journals of science all competed for readers in postbellum America and Victorian Britain.
In December 1878 Blavatsky and Olcott sailed for India, arriving in Bombay in 1879, shifting the center of their work to the British Raj. They launched The Theosophist the same year, a journal that carried reports of Indian reform movements, Orientalist scholarship, and the Society’s activities. The colonial context, with its missionary polemics and emergent Indian nationalism, provided lived terrain for cross-cultural translation that informs From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan and pervades the historical framing of her other books. Bombay’s multilingual publics and print shops furnished the infrastructure for disseminating theosophical ideas across India, Ceylon, and beyond.
The move to Adyar, near Madras (now Chennai), in 1882 consolidated an international headquarters intimately connected to Blavatsky’s evolving cosmology. Her correspondence with A P Sinnett, editor of The Pioneer in Allahabad, and Allan Octavian Hume generated the Mahatma Letters (1880–1884), which profoundly shaped the metaphysical architecture later formulated in The Secret Doctrine. These exchanges unfolded amid telegraph lines, colonial postal routes, and railway expansion, showing how empire’s communications networks enabled a transcontinental esoteric discourse. Adyar’s library and exchanges with Indian pundits, Parsi scholars, and Buddhist monks linked textual study with living traditions, an interplay visible across her major writings.
Blavatsky and Olcott traveled to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1880, publicly taking the Buddhist five precepts at Galle. Olcott’s Buddhist Catechism (1881) and subsequent educational reforms intersected with a Buddhist revival that resisted missionary dominance. This encounter nourished the ethical and contemplative vocabulary of The Voice of the Silence and informed the questions and answers format of The Key to Theosophy. The South Asian environment, encompassing Brahmo and Arya Samaj reform movements as well as Sanskritic and vernacular scholarship, offered counterpoints to Western dogmatism and materialism. It also demonstrated how religious modernization in Asia dialogued with esoteric renewal in Europe and America.
Public controversy intensified with the Coulomb affair at Adyar in 1884 and the 1885 report by Richard Hodgson for the Society for Psychical Research in London, which declared her fraudulent. Blavatsky left India in 1885, spending time in Wurzburg and Ostend before settling in London in 1887. This embattled period coincided with a shift from demonstrations of phenomena to ambitious doctrinal exposition. The pressure of investigation, polemics in the press, and strained health coalesced into a renewed literary campaign, culminating in The Secret Doctrine and followed by works intended to systematize and instruct. Across her oeuvre, controversy catalyzed consolidation.
London in the late 1880s was a matrix for occult modernism. Blavatsky founded the magazine Lucifer in 1887 and the Blavatsky Lodge soon after, drawing together artists, scientists, and seekers in a metropolis that also witnessed the formation of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1888. Periodical culture, salon debates, and public lectures let her ideas circulate alongside psychical research, socialism, and aestheticism. The capital’s publishers, translators, and reviewers provided platforms and critiques that accelerated the refinement of her teaching. Studies in Occultism and the Transactions of the Blavatsky Lodge emerged from this lecture-and-journal environment.
The Secret Doctrine appeared in London in 1888 in two volumes, published by the Theosophical Publishing Company. Organized around cosmogenesis and anthropogenesis, it invoked the Stanzas of Dzyan to argue for cyclical evolution, a hierarchy of principles, and a synthesis of science, religion, and philosophy. Its apparatus conversed with Orientalist philology, geology, and evolutionary theory while rejecting both literalist theology and strict materialism. A third volume was brought out posthumously in 1897 under Annie Besant’s supervision, from Blavatsky’s papers. The debates it provoked helped define fin de siècle occult discourse and set the intellectual stage for The Key to Theosophy and later compilations.
In 1888 Blavatsky established an Esoteric Section to formalize instruction, and in 1889 she issued The Key to Theosophy as a clear catechism for enquirers, situating doctrine against contemporary objections. The same year, The Voice of the Silence presented aphoristic teachings Blavatsky said derived from a Book of the Golden Precepts, resonating with Mahayana ethics and the bodhisattva ideal. These texts arose as urban readers sought practical guidance rather than only metaphysical architecture. Together with The Secret Doctrine’s cosmology, they formed an integrated curriculum, reflecting the pedagogy of lodge meetings, question sessions, and correspondences that underpinned the Society’s international growth.
Studies in Occultism gathered essays first published in Lucifer, the London periodical Blavatsky edited from 1887. The genre of the essay, with polemical rejoinders and didactic chapters, reflects late Victorian debates on hypnotism, will, karma, and the ethics of occult practice. This period overlapped with the Society for Psychical Research, laboratory studies of hypnosis in Paris and Nancy, and journalism on crime, degeneration, and crowd psychology. Such contexts illuminated her vocabulary of cycles, responsibility, and discipline. The dialogic Transactions of the Blavatsky Lodge (1889–1890) likewise display a classroom-like setting that informs the tone and structure of several books in the collection.
From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan first reached readers in the Russian language during the 1880s as a travelogue blending reportage, ethnography, and romance. It addressed a Russo-phone audience caught between Slavophile and Westernizer debates, fascinating many with British India, Buddhism, and Sanskritic lore. Tsarist censorship, Russian journalism, and émigré networks framed its reception, and its scenes refract the lived experiences that also inform The Theosophist. By moving between Russian and English prose, Blavatsky navigated distinct national imaginaries, a fact that helps explain the differing emphases in doctrinal books like The Secret Doctrine and more literary or didactic writings.
Nightmare Tales, issued posthumously in 1892, belongs to a late nineteenth-century stream of occult and Gothic fiction that includes stories by Kipling, Machen, and later Blackwood. Fin de siècle anxieties about degeneration, dreams, and subliminal consciousness had been amplified by new psychologies and sensational journalism. Blavatsky’s use of fiction to dramatize karmic retribution, elementals, or the perils of psychic dabbling complemented didactic works such as The Key to Theosophy. Fiction provided a vehicle for moral caution and experiential texture within the same intellectual climate that hosted spiritualist séances and psychical experiments, thereby extending the reach of theosophical themes to wider audiences.
Publishing infrastructures linked her corpus to audiences on three continents. Isis Unveiled appeared in New York in 1877; The Secret Doctrine and later works were issued from London by the Theosophical Publishing Company; The Theosophist, launched in Bombay in 1879, and Lucifer in 1887, serialized ideas for global readers. Translations into French, German, and Russian created secondary debates and shaped local receptions. Postal and telegraph systems, steamship routes through Suez, and railways in India and Europe enabled correspondence, distribution, and lodge coordination. These material conditions of print capitalism and empire are crucial to understanding the form, tone, and ambition of every book listed.
Blavatsky’s death in London on 8 May 1891, commemorated annually as White Lotus Day, initiated transitions that affected the reception of her writings. Annie Besant and later Charles W Leadbeater became prominent at Adyar; William Q Judge led a faction in the United States, culminating in a schism in 1895. The Secret Doctrine volume three (1897) appeared within that contested lineage. Indian and Ceylonese theosophists continued educational and Buddhist revival activities, anchoring the ethical dimensions stressed in The Voice of the Silence and The Key to Theosophy. Organizational dynamics thus mediated how her corpus was edited, taught, and translated in the 1890s.
Twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship has recontextualized Blavatsky’s works within global intellectual history. Vernon Harrison’s 1986 critique of the 1885 Hodgson Report reopened debates on the investigations. Boris de Zirkoff’s Collected Writings project (1966–1991) furnished annotated texts that illuminated sources and chronology. Historians have traced ties to Orientalist philology, Indian reformism, and occult modernism, while art and literary studies chart theosophical echoes. For readers of Isis Unveiled, The Secret Doctrine, The Key to Theosophy, The Voice of the Silence, Studies in Occultism, From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan, and Nightmare Tales, this wider frame reveals how her oeuvre crystallized and contested the forces of her century.
Synopsis (Selection)
Isis Unveiled (Volumes 1-2)
A two-volume critique of 19th-century science and theology that argues for a perennial esoteric tradition. Volume 1 challenges materialism via occult explanations of psychic phenomena; Volume 2 reinterprets world religions to recover an underlying wisdom.
The Secret Doctrine (Volumes 1-3)
Blavatsky’s magnum opus presenting a theosophical cosmology and anthropology grounded in the Stanzas of Dzyan. Volume 1 outlines cosmic origins and cycles; Volume 2 narrates the esoteric evolution of humanity; the posthumous Volume 3 offers supplementary notes, clarifications, and symbolic studies.
The Key to Theosophy
A Q&A primer that defines Theosophy’s core teachings and aims. It explains karma, reincarnation, postmortem states, ethical duties, and the role of the Theosophical Society, while addressing common objections.
The Voice of the Silence
A brief mystical manual of aphorisms attributed to the Book of the Golden Precepts. It outlines stages of discipleship and the compassionate Bodhisattva path through concise ethical and contemplative instructions.
Studies in Occultism
Collected essays that distinguish true occultism from mediumship and ceremonial magic. They emphasize moral prerequisites, the risks of occult practice, and the natural laws behind psychic and spiritual phenomena.
From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan
Semi-fictional travel sketches set across India that blend adventure with ethnographic observation. The narratives interweave local lore and occult episodes while critiquing colonial and social practices.
Nightmare Tales
A set of gothic and supernatural short stories with theosophical undertones. They explore themes of obsession, karma, and the unseen forces surrounding seances and occult experiments.
The Collected Works of Helena Blavatsky
Isis Unveiled
— MONTAIGNE.
Volume 1
Science
PREFACE.
The work now submitted to public judgment is the fruit of a somewhat intimate acquaintance with Eastern adepts and study of their science. It is offered to such as are willing to accept truth wherever it may be found, and to defend it, even looking popular prejudice straight in the face. It is an attempt to aid the student to detect the vital principles which underlie the philosophical systems of old.
The book is written in all sincerity. It is meant to do even justice, and to speak the truth alike without malice or prejudice. But it shows neither mercy for enthroned error, nor reverence for usurped authority. It demands for a spoliated past, that credit for its achievements which has been too long withheld. It calls for a restitution of borrowed robes, and the vindication of calumniated but glorious reputations. Toward no form of worship, no religious faith, no scientific hypothesis has its criticism been directed in any other spirit. Men and parties, sects and schools are but the mere ephemera of the world's day. TRUTH, high-seated upon its rock of adamant, is alone eternal and supreme.
We believe in no Magic which transcends the scope and capacity of the human mind, nor in "miracle," whether divine or diabolical, if such imply a transgression of the laws of nature instituted from all eternity. Nevertheless, we accept the saying of the gifted author of Festus, that the human heart has not yet fully uttered itself, and that we have never attained or even understood the extent of its powers. Is it too much to believe that man should be developing new sensibilities and a closer relation with nature? The logic of evolution must teach as much, if carried to its legitimate conclusions. If, somewhere, in the line of ascent from vegetable or ascidian to the noblest man a soul was evolved, gifted with intellectual qualities, it cannot be unreasonable to infer and believe that a faculty of perception is also growing in man, enabling him to descry facts and truths even beyond our ordinary ken. Yet we do not hesitate to accept the assertion of Biffé, that "the essential is forever the same. Whether we cut away the marble inward that hides the statue in the block, or pile stone upon stone outward till the temple is completed, our NEW result is only an old idea. The latest of all the eternities will find its destined other half-soul in the earliest." When, years ago, we first travelled over the East, exploring the penetralia of its deserted sanctuaries, two saddening and ever-recurring questions oppressed our thoughts: Where, WHO, WHAT is GOD? Who ever saw the IMMORTAL SPIRIT of man, so as to be able to assure himself of man's immortality?
It was while most anxious to solve these perplexing problems that we came into contact with certain men, endowed with such mysterious powers and such profound knowledge that we may truly designate them as the sages of the Orient. To their instructions we lent a ready ear. They showed us that by combining science with religion, the existence of God and immortality of man's spirit may be demonstrated like a problem of Euclid. For the first time we received the assurance that the Oriental philosophy has room for no other faith than an absolute and immovable faith in the omnipotence of man's own immortal self. We were taught that this omnipotence comes from the kinship of man's spirit with the Universal Soul — God! The latter, they said, can never be demonstrated but by the former. Man-spirit proves God-spirit, as the one drop of water proves a source from which it must have come. Tell one who had never seen water, that there is an ocean of water, and he must accept it on faith or reject it altogether. But let one drop fall upon his hand, and he then has the fact from which all the rest may be inferred. After that he could by degrees understand that a boundless and fathomless ocean of water existed. Blind faith would no longer be necessary; he would have supplanted it with KNOWLEDGE. When one sees mortal man displaying tremendous capabilities, controlling the forces of nature and opening up to view the world of spirit, the reflective mind is overwhelmed with the conviction that if one man's spiritual Ego can do this much, the capabilities of the FATHER SPIRIT must be relatively as much vaster as the whole ocean surpasses the single drop in volume and potency. Ex nihilo nihil fit; prove the soul of man by its wondrous powers — you have proved God! In our studies, mysteries were shown to be no mysteries. Names and places that to the Western mind have only a significance derived from Eastern fable, were shown to be realities. Reverently we stepped in spirit within the temple of Isis; to lift aside the veil of "the one that is and was and shall be" at Saïs; to look through the rent curtain of the Sanctum Sanctorum at Jerusalem; and even to interrogate within the crypts which once existed beneath the sacred edifice, the mysterious Bath-Kol. The Filia Vocis — the daughter of the divine voice — responded from the mercy-seat within the veil, and science, theology, every human hypothesis and conception born of imperfect knowledge, lost forever their authoritative character in our sight. The one-living God had spoken through his oracle—man, and we were satisfied. Such knowledge is priceless; and it has been hidden only from those who overlooked it, derided it, or denied its existence.
From such as these we apprehend criticism, censure, and perhaps hostility, although the obstacles in our way neither spring from the validity of proof, the authenticated facts of history, nor the lack of common sense among the public whom we address. The drift of modern thought is palpably in the direction of liberalism in religion as well as science. Each day brings the reactionists nearer to the point where they must surrender the despotic authority over the public conscience, which they have so long enjoyed and exercised. When the Pope can go to the extreme of fulminating anathemas against all who maintain the liberty of the Press and of speech, or who insist that in the conflict of laws, civil and ecclesiastical, the civil law should prevail, or that any method of instruction solely secular, may be approved; and Mr. Tyndall, as the mouth-piece of nineteenth century science, says, ". . . the impregnable position of science may be stated in a few words: we claim, and we shall wrest from theology, the entire domain of cosmological theory" — the end is not difficult to foresee.
Centuries of subjection have not quite congealed the life-blood of men into crystals around the nucleus of blind faith; and the nineteenth is witnessing the struggles of the giant as he shakes off the Liliputian cordage and rises to his feet. Even the Protestant communion of England and America, now engaged in the revision of the text of its Oracles, will be compelled to show the origin and merits of the text itself. The day of domineering over men with dogmas has reached its gloaming.
Our work, then, is a plea for the recognition of the Hermetic philosophy, the anciently universal Wisdom-Religion, as the only possible key to the Absolute in science and theology. To show that we do not at all conceal from ourselves the gravity of our undertaking, we may say in advance that it would not be strange if the following classes should array themselves against us:
The Christians, who will see that we question the evidences of the genuineness of their faith.
The Scientists, who will find their pretensions placed in the same bundle with those of the Roman Catholic Church for infallibility, and, in certain particulars, the sages and philosophers of the ancient world classed higher than they. Pseudo-Scientists will, of course, denounce us furiously.
Broad Churchmen and Freethinkers will find that we do not accept what they do, but demand the recognition of the whole truth.
Men of letters and various authorities, who hide their real belief in deference to popular prejudices.
The mercenaries and parasites of the Press, who prostitute its more than royal power, and dishonor a noble profession, will find it easy to mock at things too wonderful for them to understand; for to them the price of a paragraph is more than the value of sincerity. From many will come honest criticism; from many — cant. But we look to the future.
The contest now going on between the party of public conscience and the party of reaction, has already developed a healthier tone of thought. It will hardly fail to result ultimately in the overthrow of error and the triumph of Truth. We repeat again — we are laboring for the brighter morrow.
And yet, when we consider the bitter opposition that we are called upon to face, who is better entitled than we upon entering the arena to write upon our shield the hail of the Roman gladiator to Cæsar:
MORITURUS TE SALUTÂT!
New York, September, 1877.
BEFORE THE VEIL.
Joan. — Advance our waving colors on the walls!— King Henry VI. Act IV.
"My life has been devoted to the study of man, his destiny and his happiness."— J. R. BUCHANAN, M.D., Outlines of Lectures on Anthropology.
It is nineteen centuries since, as we are told, the night of Heathenism and Paganism was first dispelled by the divine light of Christianity; and two-and-a-half centuries since the bright lamp of Modern Science began to shine on the darkness of the ignorance of the ages. Within these respective epochs, we are required to believe, the true moral and intellectual progress of the race has occurred. The ancient philosophers were well enough for their respective generations, but they were illiterate as compared with modern men of science.
DOGMATIC ASSUMPTION OF MODERN SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY
The ethics of Paganism perhaps met the wants of the uncultivated people of antiquity, but not until the advent of the luminous "Star of Bethlehem," was the true road to moral perfection and the way to salvation made plain. Of old, brutishness was the rule, virtue and spirituality the exception. Now, the dullest may read the will of God in His revealed word; men have every incentive to be good, and are constantly becoming better.
This is the assumption; what are the facts? On the one hand an unspiritual, dogmatic, too often debauched clergy; a host of sects, and three warring great religions; discord instead of union, dogmas without proofs, sensation-loving preachers, and wealth and pleasure-seeking parishioners' hypocrisy and bigotry, begotten by the tyrannical exigencies of respectability, the rule of the day, sincerity and real piety exceptional. On the other hand, scientific hypotheses built on sand; no accord upon a single question; rancorous quarrels and jealousy; a general drift into materialism. A death-grapple of Science with Theology for infallibility — "a conflict of ages."
At Rome, the self-styled seat of Christianity, the putative successor to the chair of Peter is undermining social order with his invisible but omnipresent net-work of bigoted agents, and incites them to revolutionize Europe for his temporal as well as spiritual supremacy. We see him who calls himself the "Vicar of Christ," fraternizing with the anti-Christian Moslem against another Christian nation, publicly invoking the blessing of God upon the arms of those who have for centuries withstood, with fire and sword, the pretensions of his Christ to Godhood! At Berlin — one of the great seats of learning — professors of modern exact sciences, turning their backs on the boasted results of enlightenment of the post-Galileonian period, are quietly snuffing out the candle of the great Florentine; seeking, in short, to prove the heliocentric system, and even the earth's rotation, but the dreams of deluded scientists, Newton a visionary, and all past and present astronomers but clever calculators of unverifiable problems.
Between these two conflicting Titans — Science and Theology — is a bewildered public, fast losing all belief in man's personal immortality, in a deity of any kind, and rapidly descending to the level of a mere animal existence. Such is the picture of the hour, illumined by the bright noonday sun of this Christian and scientific era!
Would it be strict justice to condemn to critical lapidation the most humble and modest of authors for entirely rejecting the authority of both these combatants? Are we not bound rather to take as the true aphorism of this century, the declaration of Horace Greeley: "I accept unreservedly the views of no man, living or dead"? Such, at all events, will be our motto, and we mean that principle to be our constant guide throughout this work.
Among the many phenomenal outgrowths of our century, the strange creed of the so-called Spiritualists has arisen amid the tottering ruins of self-styled revealed religions and materialistic philosophies; and yet it alone offers a possible last refuge of compromise between the two. That this unexpected ghost of pre-Christian days finds poor welcome from our sober and positive century, is not surprising. Times have strangely changed; and it is but recently that a well-known Brooklyn preacher pointedly remarked in a sermon, that could Jesus come back and behave in the streets of New York, as he did in those of Jerusalem, he would find himself confined in the prison of the Tombs. What sort of welcome, then, could Spiritualism ever expect? True enough, the weird stranger seems neither attractive nor promising at first sight. Shapeless and uncouth, like an infant attended by seven nurses, it is coming out of its teens lame and mutilated. The name of its enemies is legion; its friends and protectors are a handful. But what of that? When was ever truth accepted a priori? Because the champions of Spiritualism have in their fanaticism magnified its qualities, and remained blind to its imperfections, that gives no excuse to doubt its reality. A forgery is impossible when we have no model to forge after. The fanaticism of Spiritualists is itself a proof of the genuineness and possibility of their phenomena. They give us facts that we may investigate, not assertions that we must believe without proof. Millions of reasonable men and women do not so easily succumb to collective hallucination. And so, while the clergy, following their own interpretations of the Bible, and science its self-made Codex of possibilities in nature, refuse it a fair hearing, real science and true religion are silent, and gravely wait further developments.
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY AFFORDS THE ONLY MIDDLE GROUND
The whole question of phenomena rests on the correct comprehension of old philosophies. Whither, then, should we turn, in our perplexity, but to the ancient sages, since, on the pretext of superstition, we are refused an explanation by the modern? Let us ask them what they know of genuine science and religion; not in the matter of mere details, but in all the broad conception of these twin truths — so strong in their unity, so weak when divided. Besides, we may find our profit in comparing this boasted modern science with ancient ignorance; this improved modern theology with the "Secret doctrines" of the ancient universal religion. Perhaps we may thus discover a neutral ground whence we can reach and profit by both.
It is the Platonic philosophy, the most elaborate compend of the abstruse systems of old India, that can alone afford us this middle ground. Although twenty-two and a quarter centuries have elapsed since the death of Plato, the great minds of the world are still occupied with his writings. He was, in the fullest sense of the word, the world's interpreter. And the greatest philosopher of the pre-Christian era mirrored faithfully in his works the spiritualism of the Vedic philosophers who lived thousands of years before himself, and its metaphysical expression. Vyasa, Djeminy, Kapila, Vrihaspati, Sumati, and so many others, will be found to have transmitted their indelible imprint through the intervening centuries upon Plato and his school. Thus is warranted the inference that to Plato and the ancient Hindu sages was alike revealed the same wisdom. So surviving the shock of time, what can this wisdom be but divine and eternal?
Plato taught justice as subsisting in the soul of its possessor and his greatest good. "Men, in proportion to their intellect, have admitted his transcendent claims." Yet his commentators, almost with one consent, shrink from every passage which implies that his metaphysics are based on a solid foundation, and not on ideal conceptions.
But Plato could not accept a philosophy destitute of spiritual aspirations; the two were at one with him. For the old Grecian sage there was a single object of attainment: REAL KNOWLEDGE. He considered those only to be genuine philosophers, or students of truth, who possess the knowledge of the really-existing, in opposition to the mere seeing; of the always-existing, in opposition to the transitory; and of that which exists permanently, in opposition to that which waxes, wanes, and is developed and destroyed alternately. "Beyond all finite existences and secondary causes, all laws, ideas, and principles, there is an INTELLIGENCE or MIND [νους, nous , the spirit], the first principle of all principles, the Supreme Idea on which all other ideas are grounded; the Monarch and Lawgiver of the universe; the ultimate substance from which all things derive their being and essence, the first and efficient Cause of all the order, and harmony, and beauty, and excellency, and goodness, which pervades the universe — who is called, by way of preëminence and excellence, the Supreme Good, the God (ο θεος) 'the God over all' (ο επι πασι θεος)." He is not the truth nor the intelligence, but "the father of it." Though this eternal essence of things may not be perceptible by our physical senses, it may be apprehended by the mind of those who are not wilfully obtuse. "To you," said Jesus to his elect disciples, "it is given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of God, but to them [the πολλοι] it is not given; . . . therefore speak I to them in parables [or allegories]; because they seeing, see not, and hearing, they hear not, neither do they understand."
The philosophy of Plato, we are assured by Porphyry, of the Neoplatonic School was taught and illustrated in the MYSTERIES. Many have questioned and even denied this; and Lobeck, in his Aglaophomus, has gone to the extreme of representing the sacred orgies as little more than an empty show to captivate the imagination. As though Athens and Greece would for twenty centuries and more have repaired every fifth year to Eleusis to witness a solemn religious farce! Augustine, the papa-bishop of Hippo, has resolved such assertions. He declares that the doctrines of the Alexandrian Platonists were the original esoteric doctrines of the first followers of Plato, and describes Plotinus as a Plato resuscitated. He also explains the motives of the great philosopher for veiling the interior sense of what he taught.1
As to the myths, Plato declares in the Gorgias and the Phædon that they were the vehicles of great truths well worth the seeking. But commentators are so little en rapport with the great philosopher as to be compelled to acknowledge that they are ignorant where "the doctrinal ends, and the mythical begins." Plato put to flight the popular superstition concerning magic and dæmons, and developed the exaggerated notions of the time into rational theories and metaphysical conceptions. Perhaps these would not quite stand the inductive method of reasoning established by Aristotle; nevertheless they are satisfactory in the highest degree to those who apprehend the existence of that higher faculty of insight or intuition, as affording a criterion for ascertaining truth.
Basing all his doctrines upon the presence of the Supreme Mind, Plato taught that the nous, spirit, or rational soul of man, being "generated by the Divine Father," possessed a nature kindred, or even homogeneous, with the Divinity, and was capable of beholding the eternal realities. This faculty of contemplating reality in a direct and immediate manner belongs to God alone; the aspiration for this knowledge constitutes what is really meant by philosophy — the love of wisdom. The love of truth is inherently the love of good; and so predominating over every desire of the soul, purifying it and assimilating it to the divine, thus governing every act of the individual, it raises man to a participation and communion with Divinity, and restores him to the likeness of God. "This flight," says Plato in the Theætetus, "consists in becoming like God, and this assimilation is the becoming just and holy with wisdom."
The basis of this assimilation is always asserted to be the preëxistence of the spirit or nous. In the allegory of the chariot and winged steeds, given in the Phædrus, he represents the psychical nature as composite and two-fold; the thumos, or epithumetic part, formed from the substances of the world of phenomena; and the qumoeidev" thumoeides, the essence of which is linked to the eternal world. The present earth-life is a fall and punishment. The soul dwells in "the grave which we call the body," and in its incorporate state, and previous to the discipline of education, the noetic or spiritual element is "asleep." Life is thus a dream, rather than a reality. Like the captives in the subterranean cave, described in The Republic, the back is turned to the light, we perceive only the shadows of objects, and think them the actual realities. Is not this the idea of Maya, or the illusion of the senses in physical life, which is so marked a feature in Buddhistical philosophy? But these shadows, if we have not given ourselves up absolutely to the sensuous nature, arouse in us the reminiscence of that higher world that we once inhabited. "The interior spirit has some dim and shadowy recollection of its antenatal state of bliss, and some instinctive and proleptic yearnings for its return." It is the province of the discipline of philosophy to disinthrall it from the bondage of sense, and raise it into the empyrean of pure thought, to the vision of eternal truth, goodness, and beauty. "The soul," says Plato, in the Theætetus, "cannot come into the form of a man if it has never seen the truth. This is a recollection of those things which our soul formerly saw when journeying with Deity, despising the things which we now say are, and looking up to that which REALLY IS. Wherefore the nous, or spirit, of the philosopher (or student of the higher truth) alone is furnished with wings; because he, to the best of his ability, keeps these things in mind, of which the contemplation renders even Deity itself divine. By making the right use of these things remembered from the former life, by constantly perfecting himself in the perfect mysteries, a man becomes truly perfect — an initiate into the diviner wisdom."
Hence we may understand why the sublimer scenes in the Mysteries were always in the night. The life of the interior spirit is the death of the external nature; and the night of the physical world denotes the day of the spiritual. Dionysus, the night-sun, is, therefore, worshipped rather than Helios, orb of day. In the Mysteries were symbolized the preëxistent condition of the spirit and soul, and the lapse of the latter into earth-life and Hades, the miseries of that life, the purification of the soul, and its restoration to divine bliss, or reunion with spirit. Theon, of Smyrna, aptly compares the philosophical discipline to the mystic rites: "Philosophy," says he, "may be called the initiation into the true arcana, and the instruction in the genuine Mysteries. There are five parts of this initiation: I., the previous purification; II., the admission to participation in the arcane rites; III., the epoptic revelation; IV., the investiture or enthroning; V. — the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship and interior communion with God, and the enjoyment of that felicity which arises from intimate converse with divine beings. . . . Plato denominates the epopteia, or personal view, the perfect contemplation of things which are apprehended intuitively, absolute truths and ideas. He also considers the binding of the head and crowning as analogous to the authority which any one receives from his instructors, of leading others into the same contemplation. The fifth gradation is the most perfect felicity arising from hence, and, according to Plato, an assimilation to divinity as far as is possible to human beings."
REVIEW OF OF THE ANCIENT PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM
Such is Platonism. "Out of Plato," says Ralph Waldo Emerson, "come all things that are still written and debated among men of thought." He absorbed the learning of his times — of Greece from Philolaus to Socrates; then of Pythagoras in Italy; then what he could procure from Egypt and the East. He was so broad that all philosophy, European and Asiatic, was in his doctrines; and to culture and contemplation he added the nature and qualities of the poet.
The followers of Plato generally adhered strictly to his psychological theories. Several, however, like Xenocrates, ventured into bolder speculations. Speusippus, the nephew and successor of the great philosopher, was the author of the Numerical Analysis, a treatise on the Pythagorean numbers. Some of his speculations are not found in the written Dialogues; but as he was a listener to the unwritten lectures of Plato, the judgment of Enfield is doubtless correct, that he did not differ from his master. He was evidently, though not named, the antagonist whom Aristotle criticised, when professing to cite the argument of Plato against the doctrine of Pythagoras, that all things were in themselves numbers, or rather, inseparable from the idea of numbers. He especially endeavored to show that the Platonic doctrine of ideas differed essentially from the Pythagorean, in that it presupposed numbers and magnitudes to exist apart from things. He also asserted that Plato taught that there could be no real knowledge, if the object of that knowledge was not carried beyond or above the sensible.
But Aristotle was no trustworthy witness. He misrepresented Plato, and he almost caricatured the doctrines of Pythagoras. There is a canon of interpretation, which should guide us in our examinations of every philosophical opinion: "The human mind has, under the necessary operation of its own laws, been compelled to entertain the same fundamental ideas, and the human heart to cherish the same feelings in all ages." It is certain that Pythagoras awakened the deepest intellectual sympathy of his age, and that his doctrines exerted a powerful influence upon the mind of Plato. His cardinal idea was that there existed a permanent principle of unity beneath the forms, changes, and other phenomena of the universe. Aristotle asserted that he taught that "numbers are the first principles of all entities." Ritter has expressed the opinion that the formula of Pythagoras should be taken symbolically, which is doubtless correct. Aristotle goes on to associate these numbers with the "forms" and "ideas" of Plato. He even declares that Plato said: "forms are numbers," and that "ideas are substantial existences — real beings." Yet Plato did not so teach. He declared that the final cause was the Supreme Goodness — to ajgaqovn. "Ideas are objects of pure conception for the human reason, and they are attributes of the Divine Reason." Nor did he ever say that "forms are numbers." What he did say may be found in the Timæus: "God formed things as they first arose according to forms and numbers."
It is recognized by modern science that all the higher laws of nature assume the form of quantitative statement. This is perhaps a fuller elaboration or more explicit affirmation of the Pythagorean doctrine. Numbers were regarded as the best representations of the laws of harmony which pervade the cosmos. We know too that in chemistry the doctrine of atoms and the laws of combination are actually and, as it were, arbitrarily defined by numbers. As Mr. W. Archer Butler has expressed it: "The world is, then, through all its departments, a living arithmetic in its development, a realized geometry in its repose."
The key to the Pythagorean dogmas is the general formula of unity in multiplicity, the one evolving the many and pervading the many. This is the ancient doctrine of emanation in few words. Even the apostle Paul accepted it as true. " Ex autouÆ, kai dij autou', kai ei" auto;n ta; paÆnta " — Out of him and through him and in him all things are. This, as we can see by the following quotation, is purely Hindu and Brahmanical:
"When the dissolution — Pralaya — had arrived at its term, the great Being — Para-Atma or Para-Purusha — the Lord existing through himself, out of whom and through whom all things were, and are and will be . . . resolved to emanate from his own substance the various creatures" (Manava-Dharma-Sastra, book i., slokas 6 and 7).
The whole of this combination of the progression of numbers in the idea of creation is Hindu. The Being existing through himself, Swayambhu or Swayambhuva, as he is called by some, is one. He emanates from himself the creative faculty, Brahma or Purusha (the divine male), and the one becomes Two; out of this Duad, union of the purely intel lectual principle with the principle of matter, evolves a third, which is Viradj, the phenomenal world. It is out of this invisible and incomprehensible trinity, the Brahmanic Trimurty, that evolves the second triad which represents the three faculties — the creative, the conservative, and the transforming. These are typified by Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, but are again and ever blended into one. Unity, Brahma, or as the Vedas called him, Tridandi, is the god triply manifested, which gave rise to the symbolical Aum or the abbreviated Trimurty. It is but under this trinity, ever active and tangible to all our senses, that the invisible and unknown Monas can manifest itself to the world of mortals. When he becomes Sarira, or he who puts on a visible form, he typifies all the principles of matter, all the germs of life, he is Purusha, the god of the three visages, or triple power, the essence of the Vedic triad. "Let the Brahmas know the sacred Syllable (Aum), the three words of the Savitri, and read the Vedas daily" (Manu, book iv., sloka 125).
"After having produced the universe, He whose power is incomprehensible vanished again, absorbed in the Supreme Soul. . . . . Having retired into the primitive darkness, the great Soul remains within the unknown, and is void of all form. . . . .
"When having again reunited the subtile elementary principles, it introduces itself into either a vegetable or animal seed, it assumes at each a new form."
"It is thus that, by an alternative waking and rest, the Immutable Being causes to revive and die eternally all the existing creatures, active and inert" (Manu, book i., sloka 50, and others).
He who has studied Pythagoras and his speculations on the Monad, which, after having emanated the Duad retires into silence and darkness, and thus creates the Triad can realize whence came the philosophy of the great Samian Sage, and after him that of Socrates and Plato.
Speusippus seems to have taught that the psychical or thumetic soul was immortal as well as the spirit or rational soul, and further on we will show his reasons. He also — like Philolaus and Aristotle, in his disquisitions upon the soul — makes of æther an element; so that there were five principal elements to correspond with the five regular figures in Geometry. This became also a doctrine of the Alexandrian school. Indeed, there was much in the doctrines of the Philaletheans which did not appear in the works of the older Platonists, but was doubtless taught in substance by the philosopher himself, but with his usual reticence was not committed to writing as being too arcane for promiscuous publication. Speusippus and Xenocrates after him, held, like their great master, that the anima mundi, or world-soul, was not the Deity, but a manifestation. Those philosophers never conceived of the One as an animate nature. The original One did not exist, as we understand the term. Not till he had united with the many — emanated existence (the monad and duad) was a being produced. The tivmion , honored — the something manifested, dwells in the centre as in the circumference, but it is only the reflection of the Deity — the World-Soul. In this doctrine we find the spirit of esoteric Buddhism.
A man's idea of God, is that image of blinding light that he sees reflected in the concave mirror of his own soul, and yet this is not, in very truth, God, but only His reflection. His glory is there, but, it is the light of his own Spirit that the man sees, and it is all he can bear to look upon. The clearer the mirror, the brighter will be the divine image. But the external world cannot be witnessed in it at the same moment. In the ecstatic Yogin, in the illuminated Seer, the spirit will shine like the noonday sun; in the debased victim of earthly attraction, the radiance has disappeared, for the mirror is obscured with the stains of matter. Such men deny their God, and would willingly deprive humanity of soul at one blow.
NO GOD, NO SOUL? Dreadful, annihilating thought! The maddening nightmare of a lunatic — Atheist; presenting before his fevered vision, a hideous, ceaseless procession of sparks of cosmic matter created by no one; self-appearing, self-existent, and self-developing; this Self no Self, for it is nothing and nobody; floating onward from nowhence, it is propelled by no Cause, for there is none, and it rushes nowhither. And this in a circle of Eternity blind, inert, and — CAUSELESS. What is even the erroneous conception of the Buddhistic Nirvana in comparison! The Nirvana is preceded by numberless spiritual transformations and metempsychoses, during which the entity loses not for a second the sense of its own individuality, and which may last for millions of ages before the Final No-Thing is reached.
Though some have considered Speusippus as inferior to Aristotle, the world is nevertheless indebted to him for defining and expounding many things that Plato had left obscure in his doctrine of the Sensible and Ideal. His maxim was "The Immaterial is known by means of scientific thought, the Material by scientific perception."
Xenocrates expounded many of the unwritten theories and teachings of his master. He too held the Pythagorean doctrine, and his system of numerals and mathematics in the highest estimation. Recognizing but three degrees of knowledge—Thought, Perception, and Envisagement (or knowledge by Intuition), he made the former busy itself with all that which is beyond the heavens; Perception with things in the heavens; Intuition with the heavens themselves.
