Chapter II (3)

But the modern heirs of these ecclesiastical falsifiers, who charge magic, spiritualism, and even magnetism with being produced by a demon, forget or perhaps never read the classics. None of our bigots has ever looked with more scorn on the _abuses_ of magic than did the true initiate of old. No modern or even mediæval law could be more severe than that of the hierophant. True, he had more discrimination, charity, and justice, than the Christian clergy; for while banishing the “unconscious” sorcerer, the person troubled with a demon, from within the sacred precincts of the adyta, the priests, instead of mercilessly burning him, took care of the unfortunate “possessed one.” Having hospitals expressly for that purpose in the neighborhood of temples, the ancient “medium,” if obsessed, was taken care of and restored to health. But with one who had, by conscious _witchcraft_, acquired powers dangerous to his fellow-creatures, the priests of old were as severe as justice herself. “Any person _accidentally_ guilty of homicide, or of any crime, or convicted of _witchcraft_, was excluded from the Eleusinian Mysteries.”[152] And so were they from all others. This law, mentioned by all writers on the ancient initiation, speaks for itself. The claim of Augustine, that all the explanations given by the Neo-platonists were invented by themselves is absurd. For nearly every ceremony in their true and successive order is given by Plato himself, in a more or less covered way. The Mysteries are as old as the world, and one well versed in the esoteric mythologies of various nations can trace them back to the days of the ante-Vedic period in India. A condition of the strictest virtue and purity is required from the _Vatou_, or candidate in India before he can become an initiate, whether he aims to be a simple fakir, a _Purohita_ (public priest) or a _Sannyâsi_, a saint of the second degree of initiation, the most holy as the most revered of them all. After having conquered, in the terrible trials preliminary to admittance to the inner temple in the subterranean crypts of his pagoda, the sannyâsi passes the rest of his life in the temple, practicing the eighty-four rules and ten virtues prescribed to the Yogis.

“No one who has not practiced, during his whole life, the ten virtues which the divine Manu makes incumbent as a duty, can be initiated into the Mysteries of the council,” say the Hindu books of initiation.

These virtues are: “Resignation; the act of rendering good for evil; temperance; probity; purity; chastity; repression of the physical senses; the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures; that of the _Superior_ soul (spirit); worship of truth; abstinence from anger.” These virtues must alone direct the life of a true Yogi. “No unworthy adept ought to defile the ranks of the holy initiates by his presence for twenty-four hours.” The adept becomes guilty after having once broken any one of these vows. Surely the exercise of such virtues is inconsistent with the idea one has of _devil_-worship and lasciviousness of purpose!

And now we will try to give a clear insight into one of the chief objects of this work. What we desire to prove is, that underlying every ancient popular religion was the same ancient wisdom-doctrine, one and identical, professed and practiced by the initiates of every country, who alone were aware of its existence and importance. To ascertain its origin, and the precise age in which it was matured, is now beyond human possibility. A single glance, however, is enough to assure one that it could not have attained the marvellous perfection in which we find it pictured to us in the relics of the various esoteric systems, except after a succession of ages. A philosophy so profound, a moral code so ennobling, and practical results so conclusive and so uniformly demonstrable is not the growth of a generation, or even a single epoch. Fact must have been piled upon fact, deduction upon deduction, science have begotten science, and myriads of the brightest human intellects have reflected upon the laws of nature, before this ancient doctrine had taken concrete shape. The proofs of this identity of fundamental doctrine in the old religions are found in the prevalence of a system of initiation; in the secret sacerdotal castes who had the guardianship of mystical words of power, and a public display of a phenomenal control over natural forces, indicating association with preterhuman beings. Every approach to the Mysteries of all these nations was guarded with the same jealous care, and in all, the penalty of death was inflicted upon initiates of any degree who divulged the secrets entrusted to them. We have seen that such was the case in the Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries, among the Chaldean Magi, and the Egyptian hierophants; while with the Hindus, from whom they were all derived, the same rule has prevailed from time immemorial. We are left in no doubt upon this point; for the _Agrushada Parikshai_ says explicitly, “Every initiate, to whatever degree he may belong, who reveals the great sacred formula, must be put to death.”

Naturally enough, this same extreme penalty was prescribed in all the multifarious sects and brotherhoods which at different periods have sprung from the ancient stock. We find it with the early Essenes, Gnostics, theurgic Neo-platonists, and mediæval philosophers; and in our day, even the Masons perpetuate the memory of the old obligations in the penalties of throat-cutting, dismemberment, and disemboweling, with which the candidate is threatened. As the Masonic “master’s word” is communicated only at “low breath,” so the selfsame precaution is prescribed in the Chaldean _Book of Numbers_ and the Jewish _Mercaba_. When initiated, the neophyte was led by an _ancient_ to a secluded spot, and there the latter whispered _in his ear_ the great secret.[153] The Mason swears, under the most frightful penalties, that he will not communicate the secrets of any degree “to a brother of an _inferior degree_;” and the _Agrushada Parikshai_ says: “Any initiate of the third degree who reveals before the prescribed time, to the initiates of the second degree, the superior truths, must be put to death.” Again, the Masonic apprentice consents to have his “tongue torn out by the roots” if he divulge anything to a profane; and in the Hindu books of initiation, the same _Agrushada Parikshai_, we find that any initiate of the first degree (the lowest) who betrays the secrets of his initiation, to members of other castes, for whom the science should be a closed book, must have “his _tongue cut out_,” and suffer other mutilations.

As we proceed, we will point out the evidences of this identity of vows, formulas, rites, and doctrines, between the ancient faiths. We will also show that not only their memory is still preserved in India, but also that the Secret Association is still alive and as active as ever. That, after reading what we have to say, it may be inferred that the chief pontiff and hierophant, the _Brahmâtma_, is still accessible to those “who know,” though perhaps recognized by another name; and that the ramifications of his influence extend throughout the world. But we will now return again to the early Christian period.

As though he were not aware that there was any esoteric significance to the exoteric symbols, and that the Mysteries themselves were composed of two parts, the lesser at Agræ, and the higher ones at Eleusinia, Clemens Alexandrinus, with a rancorous bigotry that one might expect from a renegade Neo-platonist, but is astonished to find in this generally honest and learned Father, stigmatized the Mysteries as indecent and diabolical. Whatever were the rites enacted among the neophytes before they passed to a higher form of instruction; however misunderstood were the trials of _Katharsis_ or purification, during which they were submitted to every kind of probation; and however much the immaterial or physical aspect might have led to calumny, it is but wicked prejudice which can compel a person to say that under this external meaning there was not a far deeper and spiritual significance.

It is positively absurd to judge the ancients from our own standpoint of propriety and virtue. And most assuredly it is not for the Church--which now stands accused by all the modern symbologists of having adopted precisely these same emblems in their coarsest aspect, and feels herself powerless to refute the accusations--to throw the stone at those who were her models. When men like Pythagoras, Plato, and Iamblichus, renowned for their severe morality, took part in the Mysteries, and spoke of them with veneration, it ill behooves our modern critics to judge them so rashly upon their merely external aspect. Iamblichus explains the worst; and his explanation, for an unprejudiced mind, ought to be perfectly plausible. “Exhibitions of this kind,” he says, “in the Mysteries were designed to free us from licentious passions, by gratifying the sight, and at the same time vanquishing all evil thought, through _the awful sanctity_ with which these rites were accompanied.”[154] “The wisest and best men in the Pagan world,” adds Dr. Warburton, “are unanimous in this, that the Mysteries were instituted pure, and proposed the noblest ends by the worthiest means.”[155]

In these celebrated rites, although persons of both sexes and all classes were allowed to take a part, and a participation in them was even obligatory, very few indeed attained the higher and final initiation. The gradation of the Mysteries is given us by Proclus in the fourth book of his _Theology of Plato_. “The perfective rite τελετη, precedes in order the initiation--_Muesis_--and the initiation, _Epopteia_, or the final apocalypse (revelation).” Theon of Smyrna, in _Mathematica_, also divides the mystic rites into five parts: “the first of which is the previous purification; for _neither are the Mysteries communicated to all_ who are willing to receive them; ... there are certain persons who are prevented by the voice of the crier (κηρυξ) ... since it is necessary that such as are not expelled from the Mysteries should first be refined by certain purifications which the reception of the sacred rites succeeds. The third part is denominated _epopteia_ or reception. And the fourth, which is the end and design of the revelation, is _the binding of the head and fixing of the crowns_[156] ... whether after this he (the initiated person) becomes ... an hierophant or sustains some other part of the sacerdotal office. But the fifth, which is produced from all these, _is friendship and interior communion with God_.” And this was the last and most awful of all the Mysteries.

There are writers who have often wondered at the meaning of this claim to a “friendship and interior communion with God.” Christian authors have denied the pretensions of the “Pagans” to such “communion,” affirming that only Christian saints were and are capable of enjoying it; materialistic skeptics have altogether scoffed at the idea of both. After long ages of religious materialism and spiritual stagnation, it has most certainly become difficult if not altogether impossible to substantiate the claims of either party. The old Greeks, who had once crowded around the Agora of Athens, with its altar to the “Unknown God,” are no more; and their descendants firmly believe that they have found the “Unknown” in the Jewish Jehova. The divine ecstasies of the early Christians have made room for visions of a more modern character, in perfect keeping with progress and civilization. The “Son of man” appearing to the rapt vision of the ancient Christian as coming from the seventh heaven, in a cloud of glory, and surrounded with angels and winged seraphim, has made room for a more prosaic and at the same time more business-like Jesus. The latter is now shown as making morning calls upon Mary and Martha in Bethany; as seating himself on “the _ottoman_” with the younger sister, a lover of “ethics,” while Martha goes off to the kitchen to cook. Anon the heated fancy of a blasphemous Brooklyn preacher and harlequin, the Reverend Dr. Talmage, makes us see her rushing back “with besweated brow, a pitcher in one hand and the tongs in the other ... into the presence of Christ,” and blowing him up for not caring that her sister hath left her “to serve alone.”[157]

From the birth of the solemn and majestic conception of the unrevealed Deity of the ancient adepts to such caricatured descriptions of him who died on the Cross for his philanthropic devotion to humanity, long centuries have intervened, and their heavy tread seems to have almost entirely obliterated all sense of a spiritual religion from the hearts of his professed followers. No wonder then, that the sentence of Proclus is no longer understood by the Christians, and is rejected as a “vagary” by the materialists, who, in their negation, are less blasphemous and atheistical than many of the reverends and members of the churches. But, although the Greek _epoptai_ are no more, we have now, in our own age, a people far more ancient than the oldest Hellenes, who practice the so-called “preterhuman” gifts to the same extent as did their ancestors far earlier than the days of Troy. It is to this people that we draw the attention of the psychologist and philosopher.

One need not go very deep into the literature of the Orientalists to become convinced that in most cases they do not even suspect that in the arcane philosophy of India there are depths which they have not sounded, and _cannot_ sound, for they pass on without perceiving them. There is a pervading tone of conscious superiority, a ring of contempt in the treatment of Hindu metaphysics, as though the European mind is alone enlightened enough to polish the rough diamond of the old Sanscrit writers, and separate right from wrong for the benefit of their descendants. We see them disputing over the external forms of expression without a conception of the great vital truths these hide from the profane view.

“As a rule, the Brahmans,” says Jacolliot, “rarely go beyond the class of _grihesta_ [priests of the vulgar castes] and _purohita_ [exorcisers, divines, prophets, and evocators of spirits]. And yet, we shall see ... once that we have touched upon the question and study of manifestations and phenomena, that these initiates of the _first_ degree (the lowest) attribute to themselves, and in appearance possess faculties developed to a degree which has never been equalled in Europe. As to the initiates of the second and especially of the third category, they pretend to be enabled to ignore time, space, and to command life and death.”[158]

Such initiates as these M. Jacolliot _did not meet_; for, as he says himself, they only appear on the most solemn occasions, and when the faith of the multitudes has to be strengthened by phenomena of a superior order. “They are never seen, either in the neighborhood of, or even inside the temples, except at the grand quinquennial festival of the fire. On that occasion, they appear about the middle of the night, on a platform erected in the centre of the sacred lake, like so many phantoms, and by their conjurations they illumine the space. A fiery column of light ascends from around them, rushing from earth to heaven. Unfamiliar sounds vibrate through the air, and five or six hundred thousand Hindus, gathered from every part of India to contemplate these demigods, throw themselves with their faces buried in the dust, invoking the souls of their ancestors.”[159]

Let any impartial person read the _Spiritisme dans le Monde_, and he cannot believe that this “implacable rationalist,” as Jacolliot takes pride in terming himself, said one word more than is warranted by what he had seen. His statements support and are corroborated by those of other skeptics. As a rule, the missionaries, even after passing half a lifetime in the country of “devil-worship,” as they call India, either disingenuously _deny_ altogether what they cannot help knowing to be true, or ridiculously attribute phenomena to this power of the Devil, that outrival the “miracles” of the apostolic ages. And what do we see this French author, notwithstanding his incorrigible rationalism, forced to admit, after having narrated the greatest wonders? Watch the fakirs as he would, he is compelled to bear the strongest testimony to their perfect honesty in the matter of their miraculous phenomena. “Never,” he says, “have we succeeded in detecting a single one in the act of deceit.” One fact should be noted by all who, without having been in India, still fancy they are clever enough to expose the fraud of _pretended_ magicians. This skilled and cool observer, this redoubtable materialist, after his long sojourn in India, affirms, “We unhesitatingly avow that we have not met, either in India or in Ceylon, a single European, even among the oldest residents, who has been able to indicate the means employed by these devotees for the production of these phenomena!”

And how should they? Does not this zealous Orientalist confess to us that even he, who had every available means at hand to learn many of their rites and doctrines at first hand, failed in his attempts to make the Brahmans explain to him their secrets. “All that our most diligent inquiries of the Pourohitas could elicit from them respecting the acts of their superiors (the invisible initiates of the temples), amounts to very little.” And again, speaking of one of the books, he confesses that, while purporting to reveal all that is desirable to know, it “falls back into mysterious formulas, in combinations of magical and occult letters, the secret of which it has been impossible for us to penetrate,” etc.

The fakirs, although they can never reach beyond the first degree of initiation, are, notwithstanding, the only agents between the living world and the “silent brothers,” or those initiates who never cross the thresholds of their sacred dwellings. The Fūkara-Yogis belong to the temples, and who knows but these cenobites of the sanctuary have far more to do with the psychological phenomena which attend the fakirs, and have been so graphically described by Jacolliot, than the _Pitris_ themselves? Who can tell but that the fluidic spectre of the ancient Brahman seen by Jacolliot was the Scin-lecca, the spiritual _double_, of one of these mysterious sannyâsi?

Although the story has been translated and commented upon by Professor Perty, of Geneva, still we will venture to give it in Jacolliot’s own words: “A moment after the disappearance of the hands, the fakir continuing his evocations (_mantras_) more earnestly than ever, a cloud like the first, but more opalescent and more opaque, began to hover near the small brasier, which, by request of the Hindu, I had constantly fed with live coals. Little by little it assumed a form entire human, and I distinguished the spectre--for I cannot call it otherwise--of an old Brahman sacrificator, kneeling near the little brasier.

“He bore on his forehead the signs sacred to Vishnu, and around his body the triple cord, sign of the initiates of the priestly caste. He joined his hands above his head, as during the sacrifices, and his lips moved as if they were reciting prayers. At a given moment, he took a pinch of perfumed powder, and threw it upon the coals; it must have been a strong compound, for a thick smoke arose on the instant, and filled the two chambers.

“When it was dissipated, I perceived the spectre, which, two steps from me, was extending to me its fleshless hand; I took it in mine, making a salutation, and I was astonished to find it, although bony and hard, warm and living.

“‘Art thou, indeed,’ said I at this moment, in a loud voice, ‘an ancient inhabitant of the earth?’

“I had not finished the question, when the word AM (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahman, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.

“‘Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?’ I continued.

“The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet.”[160]

“Oh Brahma! what is this mystery which takes place every night?... When lying on the matting, with eyes closed, the body is lost sight of, and the soul escapes to enter into conversation with the Pitris.... Watch over it, O Brahma, when, forsaking the resting body, it goes away to hover over the waters, to wander in the immensity of heaven, and penetrate into the dark and mysterious nooks of the valleys and grand forests of the Hymavat!” (_Agroushada Parikshai._)

The fakirs, when belonging to some particular temple, never act but under orders. Not one of them, unless he has reached a degree of extraordinary sanctity, is freed from the influence and guidance of his guru, his teacher, who first initiated and instructed him in the mysteries of the _occult_ sciences. Like the _subject_ of the European mesmerizer, the average fakir can never rid himself entirely of the psychological influence exercised on him by his guru. Having passed two or three hours in the silence and solitude of the inner temple in prayer and meditation, the fakir, when he emerges thence, is mesmerically strengthened and prepared; he produces wonders far more varied and powerful than before he entered. The “master” has _laid his hands upon him_, and the fakir feels strong.

It may be shown, on the authority of many Brahmanical and Buddhist sacred books, that there has ever existed a great difference between adepts of the higher order, and purely psychological subjects--like many of these fakirs, who are mediums in a certain qualified sense. True, the fakir is ever talking of Pitris, and this is natural; for they are his protecting deities. But are the Pitris _disembodied human beings of our race_? This is the question, and we will discuss it in a moment.

We say that the fakir may be regarded in a degree as a medium; for he is--what is not generally known--under the direct mesmeric influence of a living adept, his sannyâsi or guru. When the latter dies, the power of the former, unless he has received the last transfer of spiritual forces, wanes and often even disappears. Why, if it were otherwise, should the fakirs have been excluded from the right of advancing to the second and third degree? The lives of many of them exemplify a degree of self-sacrifice and sanctity unknown and utterly incomprehensible to Europeans, who shudder at the bare thought of such self-inflicted tortures. But however shielded from control by vulgar and earth-bound spirits, however wide the chasm between a debasing influence and their self-controlled souls; and however well protected by the seven-knotted magical bamboo rod which he receives from the guru, still the fakir lives in the outer world of sin and matter, and it is possible that his soul may be tainted, perchance, by the magnetic emanations from profane objects and persons, and thereby open an access to strange spirits and _gods_. To admit one so situated, one not under any and all circumstances sure of the mastery over himself, to a knowledge of the awful mysteries and priceless secrets of initiation, would be impracticable. It would not only imperil the security of that which must, at all hazards, be guarded from profanation, but it would be consenting to admit behind the veil a fellow being, whose mediumistic irresponsibility might at any moment cause him to lose his life through an involuntary indiscretion. The same law which prevailed in the Eleusinian Mysteries before our era, holds good now in India.

Not only must the adept have mastery over himself, but he must be able to control the inferior grades of spiritual beings, nature-spirits, and earthbound souls, in short the very ones by whom, if by any, the fakir is liable to be affected.

For the objector to affirm that the Brahman-adepts and the fakirs admit that of themselves they are powerless, and can only act with the help of disembodied human spirits, is to state that these Hindus are unacquainted with the laws of their sacred books and even the meaning of the word _Pitris_. The _Laws of Manu_, the _Atharva-Veda_, and other books, prove what we now say. “All that exists,” says the _Atharva-Veda_, “is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence the gods are in the power of the Brahmans.” This is logical, albeit seemingly paradoxical, and it is the fact. And this fact will explain to those who have not hitherto had the clew (among whom Jacolliot must be numbered, as will appear on reading his works), why the fakir should be confined to the first, or lowest degree of that course of initiation whose highest adepts, or hierophants, are the _sannyâsis_, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.

Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu _Genesis_, or _Book of Creation_ of _Manu_, the _Pitris_ are called the _lunar_ ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called “human spirits” in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:

“Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas,[161] the Gandarbas[162] and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas,[163] and the Pitris--_lunar ancestors of the human race_” (See _Institutes of Manu_, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed “progenitors of mankind”).

The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the dæmons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the “miracles” were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad dæmons, who control the powers of nature, the _elementals_, who are subordinate to the power of him “who knows.” A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir _palīt_, or _chutnā_, as that of a female human spirit _pichhalpāi_, not _pitris_. True, _pitara_ means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitrā-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.

To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the _Bagavat_ state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyâsis, the gurus, and yogis?

“Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyâsis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga.”

In this case the Pitris instead of genii are the spirits, or rather souls, of the departed ones. But they will freely communicate only with those whose atmosphere is as pure as their own, and to whose prayerful _kalassa_ (invocation) they can respond without the risk of defiling their own celestial purity. When the soul of the invocator has reached the _Sayadyam_, or perfect identity of essence with the Universal Soul, when matter is utterly conquered, then the adept can freely enter into daily and hourly communion with those who, though unburdened with their corporeal forms, are still themselves progressing through the endless series of transformations included in the gradual approach to the Paramâtma, or the grand Universal Soul.

Bearing in mind that the Christian fathers have always claimed for themselves and their saints the name of “friends of God,” and knowing that they borrowed this expression, with many others, from the technology of the Pagan temples, it is but natural to expect them to show an evil temper whenever alluding to these rites. Ignorant, as a rule, and having had biographers as ignorant as themselves, we could not well expect them to find in the accounts of their beatific visions a descriptive beauty such as we find in the Pagan classics. Whether the visions and objective phenomena claimed by both the fathers of the desert and the hierophants of the sanctuary are to be discredited, or accepted as facts, the splendid imagery employed by Proclus and Apuleius in narrating the small portion of the final initiation that they dared reveal, throws completely into the shade the plagiaristic tales of the Christian ascetics, faithful _copies_ though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the _Mikra_, or minor Mysteries of Agræ--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo.[164]

Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches[165] the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his “mistranslations,” his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have rendered us, in more correct phraseology, Plato’s _words_, but Taylor shows us Plato’s _meaning_, and this is more than can be said of Zeller, Jowett, and their predecessors. Yet, as writes Professor A. Wilder, “Taylor’s works have met with favor at the hands of men capable of profound and recondite thinking; and it must be conceded that he was endowed with a superior qualification--that of an intuitive perception of the interior meaning of the subjects which he considered. Others may have known more Greek, but he knew more Plato.”[166]

Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediæval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who _are not allowed to pry into God’s mysteries nor seek to explain_ that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is “difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints[167] could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists,” we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author “that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would _not_ have adopted them.”

To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship of the ancient heathens, would be equivalent to pulling down the whole Roman Catholic image-worship--the _Madonna_ element--and reforming the faith to Protestantism. The enforcement of the late dogma of the Immaculation was prompted by this very secret reason. The science of symbology was making too rapid progress. Blind faith in the Pope’s infallibility and in the immaculate nature of the Virgin and _of her ancestral female lineage to a certain remove_ could alone save the Church from the indiscreet revelations of science. It was a clever stroke of policy on the part of the vicegerent of God. What matters it if, by “conferring upon her such an honor,” as Don Pascale de Franciscis naïvely expresses it, he has made a goddess of the Virgin Mary, an Olympian Deity, who, having been by her very nature placed in the impossibility of sinning, can claim no virtue, no personal merit for her purity, precisely for which, as we were taught to believe in our younger days, she was chosen among all other women. If his Holiness has deprived her of this, perhaps, on the other hand, he thinks that he has endowed her with at least one physical attribute not shared by the other virgin-goddesses. But even this new dogma, which, in company with the new claim to _infallibility_, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered _heresy_ of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their _sacrificing cakes_ to the Virgin, whom they claimed to _be Virgin-born_.[168] The new sentence, “O, Virgin Mary, _conceived without sin_,” is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a “_blasphemous heresie_” by the orthodox fathers.

To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries “were not aware” from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbé Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--“conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church.”[169] Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the “wicked heathen” convey the _lingham_ of Siva. To have used _this_ car to carry in its turn the Romish representative of the female principle in nature, is to show discrimination and a thorough knowledge of the oldest mythological conceptions. They have blended the two deities, and thus represented, in a Christian procession, the “heathen” Brahma, or Nara (the father), Nari (the mother), and Viradj (the son).

Says Manu: “The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son.”[170]

There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against _an accident_ than a Pagan _Mysta_ or the Μύστης.

If during the _Aporreta_ or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, “Blessed is he who hath seen those _common concerns_ of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter,” says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the “dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify _occultly_ the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical nature ... that the soul, indeed, till purified by philosophy, suffers death through its union with the body.”

The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is _punished_ through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that “when the soul has descended into generation (from its _half_-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire;”[171] he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.

If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the _Astral_ soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is _matter_, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or _Magna-mater_, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or _nous_). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystæ; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.

Such was the chief object of the Mysteries represented as diabolical by theology, and ridiculed by modern symbologists. To disbelieve that there exist in man certain arcane powers, which, by psychological study he can develop in himself to the highest degree, become an hierophant and then impart to others under the same conditions of earthly discipline, is to cast an imputation of falsehood and lunacy upon a number of the best, purest, and most learned men of antiquity and of the middle ages. What the hierophant was allowed to see at the last hour is hardly hinted at by them. And yet Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, and many others knew and affirmed their reality.

Whether in the “inner temple,” or through the study of theurgy carried on privately, or by the sole exertion of a whole life of spiritual labor, they all obtained the practical proof of such divine possibilities for man fighting his battle with life on earth to win a life in the eternity. What the last _epopteia_ was is alluded to by Plato in _Phædrus_ (64); “... being initiated in those _Mysteries_, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries ... we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine _initiation_, we became _spectators_ of entire, simple, immovable, and _blessed visions_, resident in a pure light.” This sentence shows that they saw _visions_, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, “that the most sublime part of the _epopteia_ ... consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light,” or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: “In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in _a variety of shapes_, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according _to a human form_, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape.”[172]

“Whatever is _on earth is the resemblance and_ SHADOW _of something that is in the sphere_, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in _unchangeable_ condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the _resplendent one_ removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself.” Thus speaks _Desatir_, the Persian _Book of Shet_,[173] thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.

The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now among the Buddhists and the Hindu adepts. The highest visions, the most _truthful_, are produced, not through _natural_ ecstatics or “mediums,” as it is sometimes erroneously asserted, but through a regular discipline of gradual initiations and development of psychical powers. The Mystæ were brought into close union with those whom Proclus calls “mystical natures,” “resplendent gods,” because, as Plato says, “we were ourselves pure and immaculate, being liberated from this _surrounding vestment_, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell.”[174]

So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed _entirely_ in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely _human pitar_ (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the _vatou_-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the _Trimurti_ Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists;[175] it contains the evocation of _something more real and objective than this triune abstraction_--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity.[176] It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final triumphant reunion beyond the gates of corporeal death became for a few seconds a UNITY, that the candidate is allowed, at the moment of the initiation, to behold his future self. Thus we read in the Persian _Desatir_, of the “Resplendent one;” in the Greek philosopher-initiates, of the Augoeides--the self-shining “blessed vision resident in the pure light;” in Porphyry, that Plotinus was united to his “god” six times during his lifetime; and so on.

“In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar,” says Vrihaspati.

Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. _Nor can it be now._ It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.

_Subjective_ communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyâsi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins _to feel_ them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!

To this subjective consciousness, which is the _first_ degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the _second_ degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru’s influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the _bhutná_ into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.

The _third_ degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the _reflections_ of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his _will_. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the phenomena produced by the will of the latter do not generally run the market-places for the satisfaction of open-mouthed investigators.

The unity of God, the immortality of the spirit, belief in salvation only through our works, merit and demerit; such are the principal articles of faith of the Wisdom-religion, and the ground work of Vedaism, Buddhism, Parsism, and such we find to have been even that of the ancient Osirism, when we, after abandoning the popular sun-god to the materialism of the rabble, confine our attention to the _Books of Hermes_, the thrice-great.

“The THOUGHT concealed as yet the world in silence and darkness.... Then the Lord who exists through Himself, and _who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man_; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world.”

“He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor” (_Manu_, book i., slokas, 6-7).

Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.

“Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, _for it alone confers on man immortality_” (_Manu_, book xii., sloka 85).

And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.

“The man who recognizes the _Supreme Soul_, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally _absorbed_ in the bosom of Brahma” (_Manu_, book xii., sloka 125).

The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Müller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit’s immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a _state_, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a _part_ of the integral _whole_, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modifications of form; for form pertains to matter, and the state of _Nirvana_ implies a complete purification or a final riddance from even the most sublimated particle of matter.

This word, _absorbed_, when it is proved that the Hindus and Buddhists believe in the _immortality_ of the spirit, must necessarily mean intimate union, not annihilation. Let Christians call them idolaters, if they still dare do so, in the face of science and the latest translations of the sacred Sanscrit books; they have no right to present the speculative philosophy of ancient sages as an inconsistency and the philosophers themselves as illogical fools. With far better reason we can accuse the ancient Jews of utter _nihilism_. There is not a word contained in the Books of Moses--or the prophets either--which, taken literally, implies the spirit’s immortality. Yet every devout Jew hopes as well to be “gathered into the bosom of A-Braham.”

The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anæsthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the _Doppelganger_, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.

How dangerous may often become _untrained_ mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a “medium;” hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his “familiar spirit” as they call it, his _daimonion_; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the _Secret Records_ teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate _witchcraft_[177] but even of those who were known to have “a familiar spirit.” The law was just and logical, because a genuine medium is more or less irresponsible; and the eccentricities of Socrates are thus accounted for in some degree. A medium must be _passive_; and if a firm believer in his “spirit-guide” he will allow himself to be ruled by the latter, not by the rules of the sanctuary. A _medium_ of olden times, like the modern “medium” was subject to be _entranced_ at the will and pleasure of the “power” which _controlled_ him; therefore, he could not well have been entrusted with the awful secrets of the final initiation, “never to be revealed under the penalty of death.” The old sage, in unguarded moments of “spiritual inspiration,” revealed that which he had never learned; and was therefore put to death as an atheist.