Chapter VIII: {253} (2)

Again, the _collective character_ of mental phenomena is illustrated by an anomalous psychological condition invading and dominating over thousands upon thousands, depriving them of everything but automatic action, and giving rise to the popular opinion of demoniacal possession, an opinion in some sense justified by the satanic passions, emotions, and acts which accompany the condition. At one period, the aggregate tendency is to retirement and contemplation; hence, the countless votaries of monachism and anchoretism; at another the mania is directed toward _action_, having for its proposed end some utopian scheme, equally impracticable and useless; hence, the myriads who have forsaken their kindred, their homes, and their country, to seek a land whose stones were gold, or to wage exterminating war for the possession of worthless cities and trackless deserts.[456]

The author from whom the above is quoted says that “the seeds of vice {275} and crime appear to be sown under the surface of society, and to spring up and bring forth fruit with appalling rapidity and paralyzing succession.”

In the presence of these striking phenomena science stands speechless; she does not even attempt to conjecture as to their cause, and naturally, for she has not yet learned to look outside of this ball of dirt upon which we live, and its heavy atmosphere, for the hidden influences which are affecting us day by day, and even minute by minute. But the ancients, whose “ignorance” is assumed by Mr. Proctor, fully realized the fact that the reciprocal relations between the planetary bodies is as perfect as those between the corpuscles of the blood, which float in a common fluid; and that each one is affected by the combined influences of all the rest, as each in its turn affects each of the others. As the planets differ in size, distance, and activity, so differ in intensity their impulses upon the ether or astral light, and the magnetic and other subtile forces radiated by them in certain aspects of the heavens. Music is the combination and modulation of sounds, and sound is the effect produced by the vibration of the ether. Now, if the impulses communicated to the ether by the different planets may be likened to the tones produced by the different notes of a musical instrument, it is not difficult to conceive that the Pythagorean “music of the spheres” is something more than a mere fancy, and that certain planetary aspects may imply disturbances in the ether of our planet, and certain others rest and harmony. Certain kinds of music throw us into frenzy; some exalt the soul to religious aspirations. In fine, there is scarcely a human creation which does not respond to certain vibrations of the atmosphere. It is the same with colors; some excite us, some soothe and please. The nun clothes herself in black to typify the despondency of a faith crushed under the sense of original sin; the bride robes herself in white; red inflames the anger of certain animals. If we and the animals are affected by vibrations acting upon a very minute scale, why may we not be influenced in the mass by vibrations acting upon a grand scale as the effect of combined stellar influences?

“We know,” says Dr. Elam, “that certain pathological conditions have a tendency to become epidemic, _influenced by causes not yet investigated_.... We see how strong is the tendency of opinion once promulgated to run into an epidemic form—no opinion, no delusion, is too absurd to assume this collective character. We observe, also, how remarkably the same ideas reproduce themselves and _reappear in successive ages_; ... no crime is too horrible to become popular, homicide, infanticide, suicide, poisoning, or any other diabolical {276} human conception. ... In epidemics, the cause of the rapid spread at that particular period _remains a mystery_!”

These few lines contain an undeniable _psychological_ fact, sketched with a masterly pen, and at the same time a _half_-confession of utter ignorance—“_Causes not yet investigated_.” Why not be honest and add at once, “_impossible_ to investigate with present scientific methods?”

Noticing an epidemic of incendiarism, Dr. Elam quotes from the _Annales d’Hygiene Publique_ the following cases: “A girl about seventeen years of age was arrested on suspicion ... she confessed that twice she had set fire to dwellings by _instinct_, by _irresistible necessity_.... A boy about eighteen committed many acts of this nature. He was not moved by any passion, but the bursting-out of the flames excited a profoundly pleasing emotion.”

Who but has noticed in the columns of the daily press similar incidents? They meet the eye constantly. In cases of murder, of every description, and of other crimes of a diabolical character, the act is attributed, in nine cases out of ten, by the offenders themselves, to _irresistible obsessions_. “_Something_ whispered constantly in my ear.... _Somebody_ was incessantly pushing and leading me on.” Such are the too-frequent confessions of the criminals. Physicians attribute them to hallucinations of disordered brains, and call the homicidal impulse temporary _lunacy_. But is lunacy itself well understood by any psychologist? Has its cause ever been brought under a hypothesis capable of withstanding the challenge of an uncompromising investigator? Let the controversial works of our contemporary alienists answer for themselves.

Plato acknowledges man to be the toy of the element of necessity, which he enters upon in appearing in this world of matter; he is influenced by external causes, and these causes are _daimonia_, like that of Socrates. Happy is the man physically pure, for if his _external_ soul (body) is pure, it will strengthen the second one (astral body), or the soul which is termed by him the _higher mortal soul_, which though liable to err from its own motives, will always side with reason against the animal proclivities of the body. The lusts of man arise in consequence of his perishable material body, so do other diseases; but though he regards crimes as _involuntary_ sometimes, for they result like bodily disease from external causes, Plato clearly makes a wide distinction between these _causes_. The fatalism which he concedes to humanity, does not preclude the possibility of avoiding them, for though pain, fear, anger, and other feelings are given to men by _necessity_, “if they conquered these they would live righteously, and if they were conquered by them, _unrighteously_.”[457] The {277} _dual_ man, _i. e._, one from whom the divine _immortal_ spirit has departed, leaving but the animal form and astral body (Plato’s higher _mortal_ soul), is left merely to his _instincts_, for he was conquered by all the evils entailed on matter; hence, he becomes a docile tool in the hands of the _invisibles_—beings of sublimated matter, hovering in our atmosphere, and ever ready to inspire those who are deservedly deserted by their _immortal_ counsellor, the Divine Spirit, called by Plato “genius.”[458] According to this great philosopher and initiate, one “who lived well during his appointed time would return to the habitation _of his star_, and there have a blessed and suitable existence. But if he failed in attaining this in the second generation he would pass _into a woman_—become helpless and weak as a woman;[459] and should he not cease from evil in that condition, he would be changed into some brute, which resembled him in his evil ways, and would not cease from his toils and transformations until he followed the original principle of sameness and likeness within him, and overcame, by the help of reason, the latter secretions of turbulent and irrational _elements_ (elementary dæmons) composed of fire and air, and water and earth, and returned to the form of his first and better nature.”[460]

But Dr. Elam thinks otherwise. On page 194 of his book, _A Physician’s Problems_, he says that the cause of the rapid spread of certain epidemics of disease which he is noticing “remains a mystery;” but as regards the incendiarism he remarks that “in all this we find nothing mysterious,” though the epidemic is strongly developed. Strange contradiction! De Quincey, in his paper, entitled _Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts_, treats of the epidemic of assassination, between 1588 and 1635, by which seven of the most distinguished characters of {278} the time lost their lives at the hands of assassins, and neither he, nor any other commentator has been able to explain the mysterious cause of this homicidal mania.

If we press these gentlemen for an explanation, which as pretended philosophers they are bound to give us, we are answered that it is a great deal more _scientific_ to assign for such epidemics “agitation of the mind,” “ ... a time of political excitement (1830)“ ” ... imitation and impulse,“ ” ... excitable and idle boys,“ and ”_hysterical_ girls,” than to be absurdly seeking for the verification of superstitious traditions in a hypothetical astral light. It seems to us that if, by some providential fatality, _hysteria_ were to disappear entirely from the human system, the medical fraternity would be entirely at a loss for explanations of a large class of phenomena now conveniently classified under the head of “normal symptoms of certain pathological conditions of the nervous centres.” Hysteria has been hitherto the sheet-anchor of skeptical pathologists. Does a dirty peasant-girl begin suddenly to speak with fluency different foreign languages hitherto unfamiliar to her, and to write poetry—“hysterics!” Is a medium levitated, in full view of a dozen of witnesses, and carried out of one third-story window and brought back through another—“disturbance of the nervous centres, followed by a _collective_ hysterical delusion.”[461] A Scotch terrier, caught in the room during a manifestation, is hurled by an invisible hand across the room, breaks to pieces, in his _salto mortali_, a chandelier, under a ceiling eighteen feet high, to fall down killed[462]—“_canine hallucination_!”

“True science has no belief,” says Dr. Fenwick, in Bulwer-Lytton’s _Strange Story_; “true science knows but three states of mind: denial, conviction, and the vast interval between the two, which is not belief, but the _suspension of judgment_.” Such, perhaps, was true science in Dr. Fenwick’s days. But the true science of our modern times proceeds otherwise; it either denies point-blank, without any preliminary investigation, or sits in the interim, between denial and conviction, and, dictionary in hand, invents new Græco-Latin appellations for non-existing kinds of hysteria!

How often have powerful clairvoyants and adepts in mesmerism described the epidemics and _physical_ (though to others invisible) manifestations which science attributes to epilepsy, hæmato-nervous disorders, and what not, of _somatic origin_, as their lucid vision saw them in the astral light. They affirm that the “electric waves” were in violent perturbation, and that they discerned a direct relation between this ethereal disturbance and the mental or physical epidemic {279} then raging. But science has heeded them not, but gone on with her encyclopædic labor of devising new names for old things.

“History,” says Du Potet, the prince of French mesmerists, “keeps but too well the sad records of sorcery. These facts were but too real, and lent themselves but too readily to dreadful malpractices of the art, to monstrous abuse!... But how did I come to find out that art? Where did I learn it? In my thoughts? no; it is _nature_ herself which discovered to me the secret. And how? By producing before my own eyes, without waiting for me to search for it, indisputable facts of sorcery and magic.... What is, after all, somnambulistic sleep? _A result of the potency of magic._ And what is it which determines these attractions, these _sudden impulses_, these raving epidemics, rages, antipathies, crises;—these convulsions which _you can make durable_?... what is it which determines them, if not the _very principle_ we employ, the agent _so decidedly well known to the ancients_? What you call nervous fluid or _magnetism_, the men of old called _occult power_, or the potency of the soul, subjection, MAGIC!”

“Magic is based on the existence of a mixed world placed _without_, not _within_ us; and with which we can enter in communication by the use of certain arts and practices.... An element _existing in nature_, unknown to most men, gets hold of a person and withers and breaks him down, as the fearful hurricane does a bulrush; it scatters men far away, it strikes them in a _thousand places_ at _the same time_, without their perceiving the invisible foe, or being able to protect themselves ... all this is _demonstrated_; but that this element could choose friends and select _favorites_, obey their _thoughts_, answer to the human voice, and understand the meaning of _traced signs_, that is what people cannot realize, and _what their reason rejects_, and that is _what I saw_; and I say it here most emphatically, that for me it is a fact and _a truth_ demonstrated for ever.”[463]

“If I entered into greater details, one could readily understand that there do exist _around_ us, _as in ourselves_, mysterious beings who have _power_ and _shape_, who enter and go out at will, notwithstanding the well-closed doors.”[464] Further, the great mesmerizer teaches us that the faculty of directing this fluid is a “physical property, resulting from our organization ... it passes through all bodies ... everything can be used as a conductor for magical operations, and it will retain the power of producing effects in its turn.” This is the theory common to all hermetic philosophers. Such is the power of the fluid, “that _no chemical or physical forces are able to destroy it_.... There is very little analogy between the imponderable fluids {280} known to physicists and this animal magnetic fluid.”[465]

If we now refer to mediæval ages, we find, among others, Cornelius Agrippa telling us precisely the same: “The ever-changing universal force, the ‘soul of the world,’ can fecundate anything by infusing in it its own celestial properties. Arranged according to the formula taught by _science_, these objects receive the gift of communicating to us their virtue. It is sufficient to wear them, to feel them immediately operating on the soul as on the body.... Human soul possesses, from the fact of its being of the same essence as all creation, a _marvellous power_. One who possesses the secret is enabled to rise in science and knowledge as high as his imagination will carry him; but he does that only on the condition of becoming closely united to this universal force.... Truth, even the future, can be then made ever present to the eyes of the soul; and this fact has been many times demonstrated by things coming to pass as they were seen and described beforehand ... time and space vanish before the eagle eye of the immortal soul ... her power becomes boundless ... she can shoot through space and envelop with her presence a man, _no matter at what distance_; she can plunge and penetrate him through, and make him hear the voice of the person she belongs to, as if that person were in the room.”[466]

If unwilling to seek for proof or receive information from mediæval, hermetic philosophy, we may go still further back into antiquity, and select, out of the great body of philosophers of the pre-Christian ages, one who can least be accused of superstition and credulity—Cicero. Speaking of those whom he calls _gods_, and who are either human or atmospheric spirits, “We know,” says the old orator, “that of all living beings man is the best formed, and, as the gods belong to this number, they must have a human form.... I do not mean to say that the gods have body and blood in them; but I say that they _seem_ as if they had bodies with blood in them.... Epicurus, for whom hidden things were as tangible as if he had touched them with his finger, teaches us that gods are not generally visible, but that they are _intelligible_; that they are not bodies having a certain solidity ... but that we can recognize them by their _passing_ images; that as there are _atoms_ enough in the infinite space _to produce such images_, these are produced before us ... and make us realize what are these happy, immortal beings.”[467]

“When the initiate,” says Levi, in his turn, “has become quite {281} _lucide_, he communicates and directs at will the _magnetic_ vibrations in the mass of astral light.... Transformed in human light at the moment of the conception, _it_ (the light) becomes the _first envelope of the soul_; by combination with the subtlest fluids it forms an ethereal body, or the _sidereal phantom_, which is entirely disengaged _only_ at the moment of death.”[468] To project this ethereal body, at no matter what distance; to render it more objective and tangible by condensing over its fluidic form the waves of the parent essence, is the great secret of the adept-_magician_.

Theurgical magic is the last expression of occult psychological science. The Academicians reject it as the hallucination of diseased brains, or brand it with the opprobrium of charlatanry. We deny to them most emphatically the right of expressing their opinion on a subject which they have never investigated. They have no more right, in their present state of knowledge, to judge of magic and Spiritualism than a Fiji islander to venture his opinion about the labors of Faraday or Agassiz. About all they can do on any one day is to correct the errors of the preceding day. Nearly three thousand years ago, earlier than the days of Pythagoras, the ancient philosophers claimed that light was ponderable—hence _matter_, and that light was force. The corpuscular theory, owing to certain Newtonian failures to account for it, was laughed down, and the undulatory theory, which proclaimed light _imponderable_, accepted. And now the world is startled by Mr. Crookes _weighing_ light with his radiometer! The Pythagoreans held that neither the sun nor the stars were the _sources_ of light and heat, and that the former was but an agent; but the modern schools teach the contrary.

The same may be said respecting the Newtonian law of gravitation. Following strictly the Pythagorean doctrine, Plato held that gravitation was not merely a law of the magnetic attraction of lesser bodies to larger ones, but a magnetic repulsion of similars and attraction of dissimilars. “Things brought together,” says he, “contrary to nature, are naturally at war, and repel one another.”[469] This cannot be taken to mean that repulsion occurs of necessity between bodies of dissimilar properties, but simply that when naturally antagonistic bodies are brought together they repel one another. The researches of Bart and Schweigger leave us in little or no doubt that the ancients were well acquainted with the mutual attractions of iron and the lodestone, as well as with the positive and negative properties of electricity, by whatever name they may have called it. {282} The reciprocal magnetic relations of the planetary orbs, which are all magnets, was with them an accepted fact, and aërolites were not only called by them magnetic stones, but used in the Mysteries for purposes to which we now apply the magnet. When, therefore, Professor A. M. Mayer, of the Stevens Institute of Technology, in 1872, told the Yale Scientific Club that the earth is a great magnet, and that “on any sudden agitation of the sun’s surface the magnetism of the earth receives a profound disturbance in its equilibrium, causing fitful tremors in the magnets of our observatories, and producing those grand outbursts of the polar lights, whose lambent flames dance in rhythm to the quivering needle,”[470] he only restated, in good English, what was taught in good Doric untold centuries before the first Christian philosopher saw the light.

The prodigies accomplished by the priests of theurgical magic are so well authenticated, and the evidence—if human testimony is worth anything at all—is so overwhelming, that, rather than confess that the Pagan theurgists far outrivalled the Christians in miracles, Sir David Brewster piously concedes to the former the greatest proficiency in physics, and everything that pertains to natural philosophy. Science finds herself in a very disagreeable dilemma. She must either confess that the ancient physicists were superior in knowledge to her modern representatives, or that there exists something in nature beyond physical science, and that _spirit_ possesses powers of which our philosophers never dreamed.

“The mistake we make in some science we have specially cultivated,” says Bulwer-Lytton, “is often only to be seen by the light of a separate science as especially cultivated by another.”[471]

Nothing can be easier accounted for than the highest possibilities of magic. By the radiant light of the universal magnetic ocean, whose electric waves bind the cosmos together, and in their ceaseless motion penetrate every atom and molecule of the boundless creation, the disciples of mesmerism—howbeit insufficient their various experiments—intuitionally perceive the alpha and omega of the great mystery. Alone, the study of this agent, which is the divine breath, can unlock the secrets of psychology and physiology, of cosmical and spiritual phenomena.

“Magic,” says Psellus, “formed the last part of the sacerdotal science. It investigated the nature, power, and quality of everything sublunary; of the elements and their parts, of animals, all various plants and their fruits, of stones and herbs. In short, it explored the essence and power of everything. From hence, therefore, it produced its {283} effects And it formed _statues_ (magnetized) which procure health, and made all various figures and things (talismans) which could equally become the instruments of disease as well as of health. Often, too, celestial fire is made to appear through magic, and then statues laugh and lamps are spontaneously enkindled.”[472]

If Galvani’s modern discovery can set in motion the limbs of a dead frog, and force a dead man’s face to express, by the distortion of its features, the most varied emotions, from joy to diabolical rage, despair, and horror, the Pagan priests, unless the combined evidence of the most trustworthy men of antiquity is not to be relied upon, accomplished the still greater wonders of making their stone and metal statues to sweat and laugh. The _celestial_, pure fire of the Pagan altar was electricity drawn from the astral light. Statues, therefore, if properly prepared, might, without any accusation of superstition, be allowed to have the property of imparting health and disease by contact, as well as any modern galvanic belt, or overcharged battery.

Scholastic skeptics, as well as ignorant materialists, have greatly amused themselves for the last two centuries over the _absurdities_ attributed to Pythagoras by his biographer, Iamblichus. The Samian philosopher is said to have persuaded a she-bear to give up eating human flesh; to have forced a white eagle to descend to him from the clouds, and to have subdued him by stroking him gently with the hand, and by talking to him. On another occasion, Pythagoras actually persuaded an ox to renounce eating beans, by merely whispering in the animal’s ear![473] Oh, ignorance and superstition of our forefathers, how ridiculous they appear in the eyes of our enlightened generations! Let us, however, analyze this absurdity. Every day we see unlettered men, proprietors of strolling menageries, taming and completely subduing the most ferocious animals, merely by the power of their irresistible will. Nay, we have at the present moment in Europe several young and physically-weak girls, under twenty years of age, fearlessly doing the same thing. Every one has either witnessed or heard of the seemingly magical power of some mesmerizers and psychologists. They are able to subjugate their patients for any length of time. Regazzoni, the mesmerist who excited such wonder in France and London, has achieved far more extraordinary feats than what is above attributed to Pythagoras. Why, then, accuse the ancient biographers of such men as Pythagoras and Apollonius of Tyana of either wilful misrepresentation or absurd superstition? When we realize that the majority of those {284} who are so skeptical as to the magical powers possessed by the ancient philosophers, who laugh at the old theogonies and the fallacies of mythology, nevertheless have an implicit faith in the records and inspiration of their Bible, hardly daring to doubt even that monstrous absurdity that Joshua arrested the course of the sun, we may well say _Amen_ to Godfrey Higgins’ just rebuke: “When I find,” he says, “learned men believing _Genesis literally_, which the ancients, with all their failings, had too much sense to receive except allegorically, I am tempted to doubt the reality of the improvement of the human mind.”[474]

One of the very few commentators on old Greek and Latin authors, who have given their just dues to the ancients for their mental development, is Thomas Taylor. In his translation of Iamblichus’ _Life of Pythagoras_, we find him remarking as follows: “Since Pythagoras, as Iamblichus informs us, was initiated in all the Mysteries of Byblus and Tyre, in the sacred operations of the Syrians, and in the Mysteries of the Phœnicians, and also that he spent two and twenty years in the adyta of temples in Egypt, associated with the magians in Babylon, and was instructed by them in their venerable knowledge, it is not at all wonderful that he was skilled in magic, or theurgy, and was therefore able to perform things which surpass merely human power, and which appear to be perfectly incredible to the vulgar.”[475]

The universal ether was not, in their eyes, simply a something stretching, tenantless, throughout the expanse of heaven; it was a boundless ocean peopled like our familiar seas with monstrous and minor creatures, and having in its every molecule the germs of life. Like the finny tribes which swarm in our oceans and smaller bodies of water, each kind having its _habitat_ in some spot to which it is curiously adapted, some friendly and some inimical to man, some pleasant and some frightful to behold, some seeking the refuge of quiet nooks and land-locked harbors, and some traversing great areas of water, the various races of the _elemental_ spirits were believed by them to inhabit the different portions of the great ethereal ocean, and to be exactly adapted to their respective conditions. If we will only bear in mind the fact that the rushing of planets through space must create as absolute a disturbance in this plastic and attenuated medium, as the passage of a cannon shot does in the air or that of a steamer in the water, and on a cosmic scale, we can understand that certain planetary aspects, admitting our premises to be true, may produce much more violent agitation and cause much stronger currents to flow in a given direction, than others. With the same premises conceded, we may also see why, by such various aspects of the stars, shoals of friendly or {285} hostile “elementals” might be poured in upon our atmosphere, or some particular portion of it, and make the fact appreciable by the effects which ensue.

According to the ancient doctrines, the soulless elemental spirits were evolved by the ceaseless motion inherent in the astral light. Light is force, and the latter is produced by the _will_. As this will proceeds from an intelligence which cannot err, for it has nothing of the material organs of _human_ thought in it, being the superfine pure emanation of the highest divinity itself—(Plato’s “Father”) it proceeds from the beginning of time, according to immutable laws, to evolve the elementary fabric requisite for subsequent generations of what we term human races. All of the latter, whether belonging to this planet or to some other of the myriads in space, have their earthly bodies evolved in the matrix out of the bodies of a certain class of these elemental beings which have passed away in the invisible worlds. In the ancient philosophy there was no missing link to be supplied by what Tyndall calls an “educated imagination;” no hiatus to be filled with volumes of materialistic speculations made necessary by the absurd attempt to solve an equation with but one set of quantities; our “ignorant” ancestors traced the law of evolution throughout the whole universe. As by gradual progression from the star-cloudlet to the development of the physical body of man, the rule holds good, so from the universal ether to the incarnate human spirit, they traced one uninterrupted series of entities. These evolutions were from the world of spirit into the world of gross matter; and through that back again to the source of all things. The “descent of species” was to them a descent from the spirit, primal source of all, to the “degradation of matter.” In this complete chain of unfoldings the elementary, spiritual beings had as distinct a place, midway between the extremes, as Mr. Darwin’s missing-link between the ape and man.

No author in the world of literature ever gave a more truthful or more poetical description of these beings than Sir E. Bulwer-Lytton, the author of _Zanoni_. Now, himself “a thing not of matter” but an “Idea of joy and light,” his words sound more like the faithful echo of memory than the exuberant outflow of mere imagination.

“Man is arrogant in proportion of his ignorance,” he makes the wise Mejnour say to Glyndon. “For several ages he saw in the countless worlds that sparkle through space like the bubbles of a shoreless ocean, only the petty candles ... that Providence has been pleased to light for no other purpose but to make the night more agreeable to man.... Astronomy has corrected this delusion of human vanity, and man now reluctantly confesses that the stars are worlds, larger and more glorious than his own.... Everywhere, then, in this immense design, {286} science brings new life to light.... Reasoning, then, by evident analogy, if not a leaf, if not a drop of water, but is, no less than yonder star, a habitable and breathing world—nay, if even man himself, is a world to other lives, and millions and myriads dwell in the rivers of his blood, and inhabit man’s frame, as man inhabits earth—common sense (if our schoolmen had it) would suffice to teach that the circumfluent infinite which you call space—the boundless impalpable which divides earth from the moon and stars—is filled also with its correspondent and appropriate life. Is it not a visible absurdity to suppose that being is crowded upon every leaf, and yet absent from the immensities of space! The law of the great system forbids the waste even of an atom; it knows no spot where something of life does not breathe.... Well, then, can you conceive that space, which is the infinite itself, is alone a waste, is alone lifeless, is less useful to the one design of universal being ... than the peopled leaf, than the swarming globule? The microscope shows you the creatures on the leaf; _no mechanical tube is yet invented to discover the nobler and more gifted things that hover in the illimitable air_. Yet between these last and man is a mysterious _and terrible affinity_.... But first, to penetrate this barrier, the soul with which you listen must be sharpened by intense enthusiasm, purified from all earthly desires.... When thus prepared, science can be brought to aid it; the sight itself may be rendered more subtile, the nerves more acute, the spirit more alive and outward, and the element itself—the air the space—may be made, by certain secrets of the higher chemistry, more palpable and clear. And this, too, is not _magic_ as the credulous call it; as I have so often said before, magic (a science that violates nature) exists not; it is _but the science by which nature can be controlled_. Now, in space there are millions of beings, _not literally spiritual_, for they have all, like the animalcula unseen by the naked eye, certain forms of matter, though matter so delicate, air-drawn, and subtile, that it is, as it were, but a film, a gossamer, that clothes the spirit.... Yet, in truth, these races differ most widely ... some of surpassing wisdom, some of horrible malignity; some hostile as fiends to men, others gentle as messengers between earth and heaven.... Amid the dwellers of the threshold is one, too, surpassing in malignity and hatred all her tribe; one whose eyes have paralyzed the bravest, and whose power increases over the spirit precisely in proportion to its fear.”[476]

Such is the insufficient sketch of elemental beings void of divine spirit, given by one whom many with reason believed to know more than he was prepared to admit in the face of an incredulous public.

In the following chapter we will contrive to explain some of the {287} esoteric speculations of the initiates of the sanctuary, as to what man was, is, and may yet be. The doctrines they taught in the Mysteries—the source from which sprung the Old and partially the New Testament, belonged to the most advanced notions of morality, and religious _revelations_. While the literal meaning was abandoned to the fanaticism of the unreasoning lower classes of society, the higher ones, the majority of which consisted of _Initiates_, pursued their studies in the solemn silence of the temples, and their worship of the _one_ God of Heaven.

The speculations of Plato, in the _Banquet_, on the creation of the primordial men, and the essay on Cosmogony in the _Timæus_, must be taken allegorically, if we accept them at all. It is this hidden Pythagorean meaning in _Timæus_, _Cratylus_, and _Parmenides_, and a few other trilogies and dialogues, that the Neo-platonists ventured to expound, as far as the theurgical vow of secresy would allow them. The Pythagorean doctrine that _God is the universal mind diffused through all things_, and the dogma of the soul’s immortality, are the leading features in these apparently incongruous teachings. His piety and the great veneration Plato felt for the MYSTERIES, are sufficient warrant that he would not allow his indiscretion to get the better of that deep sense of responsibility which is felt by every adept. “Constantly perfecting himself in perfect MYSTERIES, a man in them alone becomes truly perfect,” says he in the _Phædrus_.[477]

He took no pains to conceal his displeasure that the Mysteries had become less secret than formerly. Instead of profaning them by putting them within the reach of the multitude, he would have guarded them with jealous care against all but the most earnest and worthy of his disciples.[478] While mentioning the gods, on every page, his monotheism is unquestionable, for the whole thread of his discourse indicates that by the term _gods_ be means a class of beings far lower in the scale than deities, and but one grade higher than men. Even Josephus perceived and acknowledged this fact, despite the natural prejudice of his race. In his famous onslaught upon Apion, this historian says:[479] “Those, however, among the Greeks who philosophized _in accordance with truth_, were not ignorant of anything ... nor did they fail to perceive the chilling superficialities of the {288} mythical allegories, on which account they justly despised them.... By which thing Plato, being moved, says it is not necessary to admit any one of the other poets into ‘the Commonwealth,’ and _he dismisses Homer_ blandly, after having crowned him and pouring unguent upon him, in order that indeed he should not destroy, by _his myths_, the _orthodox belief respecting one God_.”

Those who can discern the true spirit of Plato’s philosophy, will hardly be satisfied with the estimate of the same which Jowett lays before his readers. He tells us that the influence exercised upon posterity by the _Timæus_ is partly due to a misunderstanding of the doctrine of its author by the Neo-platonists. He would have us believe that the hidden meanings which they found in this _Dialogue_, are “quite at variance with the spirit of Plato.” This is equivalent to the assumption that Jowett understands what this spirit really was; whereas his criticism upon this particular topic rather indicates that he did not penetrate it at all. If, as he tells us, the Christians seem to find in his work their trinity, the word, the church, and the creation of the world, in a Jewish sense, it is because all this _is_ there, and therefore it is but natural that they should have found it. The outward building is the same; but the spirit which animated the dead letter of the philosopher’s teaching has fled, and we would seek for it in vain through the arid dogmas of Christian theology. The Sphinx is the same now, as it was four centuries before the Christian era; but the Œdipus is no more. He is slain because he has given to the world that which the world was not ripe enough to receive. He was the embodiment of truth, and he had to die, as every grand truth has to, before, like the Phœnix of old, it revives from its own ashes. Every translator of Plato’s works remarked the strange similarity between the philosophy of the esoterists and the Christian doctrines, and each of them has tried to interpret it in accordance with his own religious feelings. So Cory, in his _Ancient Fragments_, tries to prove that it is but an outward resemblance; and does his best to lower the Pythagorean Monad in the public estimation and exalt upon its ruins the later anthropomorphic deity. Taylor, advocating the former, acts as unceremoniously with the Mosaic God. Zeller boldly laughs at the pretensions of the Fathers of the Church, who, notwithstanding history and its chronology, and whether people will have it or not, insist that Plato and his school have robbed Christianity of its leading features. It is as fortunate for us as it is unfortunate for the Roman Church that such clever sleight-of-hand as that resorted to by Eusebius is rather difficult in our century. It was easier to pervert chronology “for the sake of making synchronisms,” in the days of the Bishop of Cæsarea, than it is now, and while history exists, no one can help people knowing that Plato lived 600 years before Irenæus took it into his head to {289} establish a _new_ doctrine from the ruins of Plato’s older Academy.

This doctrine of God being the universal mind diffused through all things, underlies all ancient philosophies. The Buddhistic tenets which can never be better comprehended than when studying the Pythagorean philosophy—its faithful reflection—are derived from this source as well as the Brahmanical religion and early Christianity. The purifying process of transmigrations—the metempsychoses—however grossly anthropomorphized at a later period, must only be regarded as a supplementary doctrine, disfigured by theological sophistry with the object of getting a firmer hold upon believers through a popular superstition. Neither Gautama Buddha nor Pythagoras intended to teach this purely-metaphysical allegory _literally_. Esoterically, it is explained in the “Mystery” of the _Kounboum_,[480] and relates to the purely spiritual peregrinations of the human soul. It is not in the dead letter of Buddhistical sacred literature that scholars may hope to find the true solution of its metaphysical subtilties. The latter weary the power of thought by the inconceivable profundity of its ratiocination; and the student is never farther from truth than when he believes himself nearest its discovery. The mastery of every doctrine of the perplexing Buddhist system can be attained only by proceeding strictly according to the Pythagorean and Platonic method; from universals down to particulars. The key to it lies in the refined and mystical tenets of the spiritual influx of divine life. “Whoever is unacquainted with my law,” says Buddha, “and dies in that state, must return to the earth till he becomes a perfect Samanean. To achieve this object, he must destroy within himself the trinity of _Maya_.[481] He must extinguish his passions, unite and identify himself with _the law_ (the teaching of the secret doctrine), and comprehend the religion of _annihilation_.”

Here, annihilation refers but to _matter_, that of the visible as well as of the invisible body; for the astral soul (_perisprit_) is still matter, however sublimated. The same book says that what Fo (Buddha) meant to say was, that “the primitive substance is eternal and unchangeable. Its highest revelation is the pure, luminous ether, the boundless infinite space, not a void resulting from the absence of forms, but, on the contrary, _the foundation of all forms_, and anterior to them. “But the very presence of _forms_ denotes it to be the creation of _Maya_, and all her works are as nothing before the _uncreated_ being, SPIRIT, in whose profound and sacred repose all motion must cease forever.”

Thus _annihilation_ means, with the Buddhistical philosophy, only a {290} dispersion of matter, in whatever form or _semblance_ of form it may be; for everything that bears a shape was created, and thus must sooner or later perish, _i.e._, change that shape; therefore, as something temporary, though seeming to be permanent, it is but an illusion, _Maya_; for, as eternity has neither beginning nor end, the more or less prolonged duration of some particular form passes, as it were, like an instantaneous flash of lightning. Before we have the time to realize that we have seen it, it is gone and passed away for ever; hence, even our astral bodies, pure ether, are but illusions of matter, so long as they retain their terrestrial outline. The latter changes, says the Buddhist, according to the merits or demerits of the person during his lifetime, and this is metempsychosis. When the spiritual _entity_ breaks loose for ever from every particle of matter, then only it enters upon the eternal and unchangeable Nirvana. He exists in spirit, in _nothing_; as a form, a shape, a semblance, he is completely _annihilated_, and thus will die no more, for spirit alone is no _Maya_, but the only REALITY in an illusionary universe of ever-passing forms.

It is upon this Buddhist doctrine that the Pythagoreans grounded the principal tenets of their philosophy. “Can that spirit, which gives life and motion, and partakes of the nature of light, be reduced to nonentity?” they ask. “Can that sensitive spirit in brutes which exercises memory, one of the rational faculties, die, and become nothing?” And Whitelock Bulstrode, in his able defence of Pythagoras, expounds this doctrine by adding: “If you say, they (the brutes) breathe their spirits into the air, and there vanish, that is all I contend for. The air, indeed, is the proper place to receive them, being, according to Laertius, full of souls; and, according to Epicurus, full of atoms, the principles of all things; for even this place wherein we walk and birds fly has so much of a spiritual nature, that it is invisible, and, therefore, may well be the receiver of forms, since the forms of all bodies are so; we can only see and hear its effects; the air itself is too fine, and above the capacity of the age. What then is the ether in the region above, and what are the influences or forms that descend from thence?” The _spirits_ of creatures, the Pythagoreans hold, who are emanations of the most sublimated portions of ether, emanations, BREATHS, _but not forms_. Ether is incorruptible, all philosophers agree in that; and what is incorruptible _is so far from being annihilated_ when it gets rid of the _form_, that it lays a good claim to IMMORTALITY. “But what is that which has no body, no _form_; which is imponderable, invisible and indivisible; that which exists and yet _is not_?” ask the Buddhists. “It is Nirvana,” is the answer. It is NOTHING, not a region, but rather {291} a state. When once Nirvana is reached, man is exempt from the effects of the “four truths;” for an effect can only be produced through a certain cause, and every cause is _annihilated_ in this state.

These “four truths” are the foundation of the whole Buddhist doctrine of Nirvana. They are, says the book of _Pradjuâ Pâramitâ_,[482] 1. The existence of pain. 2. The production of pain. 3. The annihilation of pain. 4. The way to the annihilation of pain. What is the source of pain?—Existence. Birth existing, decrepitude and death ensue; for wherever there is a form, there is a _cause_ for pain and suffering. _Spirit_ alone has no form, and therefore _cannot be said to exist_. Whenever man (the ethereal, inner man) reaches that point when he becomes utterly spiritual, hence, formless, he has reached a state of perfect bliss. MAN as an objective being becomes annihilated, but the spiritual entity with its subjective life, will live for ever, for spirit is incorruptible and immortal.

It is by the spirit of the teachings of both Buddha and Pythagoras, that we can so easily recognize the identity of their doctrines. The all-pervading, universal soul, the _Anima Mundi_, is Nirvana; and Buddha, as a generic name, is the anthropomorphized _monad_ of Pythagoras. When resting in Nirvana, the final bliss, Buddha is the silent monad, dwelling in darkness and silence; he is also the formless Brahm, the sublime but _unknowable_ Deity, which pervades invisibly the whole universe. Whenever it is manifested, desiring to impress itself upon humanity in a shape intelligent to our intellect, whether we call it an _avatar_, or a King Messiah, or a _permutation_ of Divine Spirit, _Logos_, Christos, it is all one and the same thing. In each case it is “the Father,” who is in the _Son_, and the Son in “the Father.” The immortal spirit overshadows the mortal man. It enters into him, and pervading his whole being, makes of him a god, who descends into his earthly tabernacle. Every man may become a Buddha, says the doctrine. And so throughout the interminable series of ages we find now and then men who more or less succeed in _uniting_ themselves “with God,” as the expression goes, with their _own spirit_, as we ought to translate. The Buddhists call such men _Arhat_. An Arhat is next to a Buddha, and none is equal to him either in _infused_ science, or _miraculous_ powers. Certain fakirs demonstrate the theory well in practice, as Jacolliot has proved.

Even the so-called _fabulous_ narratives of certain Buddhistical books, when stripped of their allegorical meaning, are found to be the secret doctrines taught by Pythagoras. In the Pali Books called the _Jutakâs_, are given the 550 incarnations or metempsychoses of Buddha. {292} They narrate how he has appeared in every form of animal life, and animated every sentient being on earth, from infinitesimal insect to the bird, the beast, and finally man, the microcosmic image of God on earth. Must this be taken _literally_; is it intended as a description of the _actual_ transformations and existence of one and the same individual immortal, divine spirit, which by turns has animated every kind of sentient being? Ought we not rather to understand, with Buddhist metaphysicians, that though the individual human spirits are numberless, collectively they are one, as every drop of water drawn out of the ocean, metaphorically speaking, may have an individual existence and still be one with the rest of the drops going to form that ocean; for each human spirit is a scintilla of the one all-pervading light? That this divine spirit animates the flower, the particle of granite on the mountain side, the lion, the man? Egyptian Hierophants, like the Brahmans, and the Buddhists of the East, and some Greek philosophers, maintained originally that the same spirit that animates the particle of dust, lurking latent in it, animates man, manifesting itself in him in its highest state of activity. The doctrine, also, of a gradual refusion of the human _soul_ into the essence of the primeval parent spirit, was universal at one time. But this doctrine never implied annihilation of the higher spiritual _ego_—only the dispersion of the _external forms_ of man, after his terrestrial death, as well as during his abode on earth. Who is better fitted to impart to us the mysteries of after-death, so erroneously thought impenetrable, than those men who having, through self-discipline and purity of life and purpose, succeeded in uniting themselves with their “God,” were afforded _some_ glimpses, however imperfect, of the great truth.[483] And these seers tell us strange stories about the _variety_ of forms assumed by disembodied astral souls; forms of which each one is a spiritual though concrete reflection of the abstract state of the mind, and thoughts of the once living man.

To accuse Buddhistical philosophy of rejecting a Supreme Being—God, and the soul’s immortality, of atheism, in short, on the ground that according to their doctrines, Nirvana means _annihilation_, and _Svabhâvât is_ NOT _a person, but nothing_, is simply absurd. The En (or Ayîn) of the Jewish En-Soph, also means _nihil_ or _nothing_, that which is not (_quo ad nos_); but no one has ever ventured to twit the Jews with atheism. In both cases the real meaning of the term _nothing_ carries with it the idea that God is _not a thing_, not a concrete or visible Being to which a name expressive of _any_ object known to us on earth may be applied with propriety.