An Era of Disenchantment and
Rebuilding Has Already Begun
Helena P. Blavatsky
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Great is the
self-satisfaction of modern science, and unexampled its achievements. Pre-Christian
and medieval philosophers may have left a few landmarks over unexplored mines:
but the discovery of all the gold and priceless jewels is due to the patient
labours of the modern scholar. And thus they declare that the genuine, real
knowledge of the nature of the Kosmos and of man is all of recent growth. The
luxuriant modern plant has sprung from the dead weeds of ancient superstitions.
Such, however, is not the view of the students of Theosophy. And they
say that it is not sufficient to speak contemptuously of “the untenable
conceptions of an uncultivated past”, as Mr. Tyndall and others have done, to
hide the intellectual quarries out of which the reputations of so many modern
philosophers and scientists have been hewn.
How many of our distinguished scientists have derived honour and credit
by merely dressing up the ideas of those old philosophers, whom they are ever
ready to disparage, is left to an impartial posterity to say. But conceit and
self-opinionatedness have fastened like two hideous cancers on the brains of
the average man of learning; and this is especially the case with the
Orientalists-Sanskritists, Egyptologists and Assyriologists. The former are
guided (or perhaps only pretend to be guided) by post-Mahabharatan
commentators; the latter by arbitrarily interpreted papyri, collated with what
this or the other Greek writer said, or passed over in silence, and by the
cuneiform inscriptions on half-destroyed clay tablets copied by the Assyrians
from “Accado”- Babylonian records.
Too many of them are apt to forget, at every convenient opportunity,
that the numerous changes in language, the allegorical phraseology and evident
secretiveness of old mystic writers, who were generally under the obligation
never to divulge the solemn secrets of the sanctuary, might
have sadly misled both translators and commentators. Most of our Orientalists
will rather allow their conceit to run away with their logic and reasoning
powers than admit their ignorance, and they will proudly claim like Professor
Sayce [1] that they have
unriddled the true meaning of the religious symbols of old, and can interpret
esoteric texts far more correctly than could the initiated hierophants of Chaldea
and Egypt.
This amounts to saying that the ancient hierogrammatists and priests,
who were the inventors of all the allegories which served as veils to the many
truths taught at the Initiations, did not possess a clue to the sacred texts
composed or written by themselves. But this is on a par with that other
illusion of some Sanskritists, who, though they have never even been in India,
claim to know Sanskrit accent and pronunciation, as also the meaning of the
Vedic allegories, far better than the most learned among the greatest Brahmanical
pundits and Sanskrit scholars of India.
After this who can wonder that the jargon and blinds of our medieval
alchemists and Kabalists are also read literally by the modern student; that
the Greek and even the ideas of Aeschylus are corrected and improved
upon by the Cambridge and Oxford Greek scholars, and that the veiled parables of
Plato are attributed to his “ignorance”. Yet if the students of the dead
languages know anything, they ought to know that the method of extreme
necessitarianism was practiced in ancient as well as in modern philosophy; that
from the first ages of man, the fundamental truths of all that we are permitted
to know on earth were in the safe keeping of the Adepts of the sanctuary; that
the difference in creeds and religious practice was only external; and that
those guardians of the primitive divine revelation, who had solved every
problem that is within the grasp of human intellect, were bound together by a
universal freemasonry of science and philosophy, which formed one unbroken chain
around the globe.
It is for philology and the Orientalists to endeavour to find the end of
the thread. But if they will persist in seeking it in one direction only, and
that the wrong one, truth and fact will never be discovered. It thus remains
the duty of psychology and Theosophy to help the world to arrive at them. Study
the Eastern religions by the light of Eastern - not Western - philosophy, and
if you happen to relax correctly one single loop of the old religious systems,
the chain of mystery may be disentangled.
But to achieve this, one must not agree with those who teach that it is
unphilosophical to enquire into first causes, and that all that we can do is to
consider their physical effects. The field of scientific investigation is
bounded by physical nature on every side; hence, once the limits of matter are
reached, enquiry must stop and work be re-commenced. As the Theosophist has no
desire to play at being a squirrel upon its revolving wheel, he must refuse to
follow the lead of the materialists.
He, at any rate, knows that the revolutions of the physical world are,
according to the ancient doctrine, attended by like revolutions in the world of
intellect, for the spiritual evolution in the universe proceeds in cycles, like
the physical one. Do we not see in history a regular alternation of ebb and
flow in the tide of human progress? Do we not see in history, and even find
this within our own experience, that the great kingdoms of the world, after
reaching the culmination of their greatness, descend again, in accordance with
the same law by which they ascended? till, having reached the lowest point,
humanity reasserts itself and mounts up once more, the height of its attainment
being, by this law of ascending progression by cycles, somewhat higher than the
point from which it had before descended. Kingdoms and empires are under the
same cyclic laws as plants, races and everything else in Kosmos.
The division of the history of mankind into what the Hindus call the
Sattva, Tretya, Dvapara and Kali Yugas, and what the Greeks referred to as “the
Golden, Silver, Copper, and Iron Ages” is not a fiction. We see the same thing
in the literature of peoples. An age of great inspiration and unconscious
productiveness is invariably followed by an age of criticism and consciousness.
The one affords material for the analyzing and critical intellect of the other.
“The moment is more opportune than ever for the review of old
philosophies. Archaeologists, philologists, astronomers, chemists and
physicists are getting nearer and nearer to the point where they will be forced
to consider them. Physical science has already reached its limits of
exploration; dogmatic theology sees the springs of its inspiration dry. The day
is approaching when the world will receive the proofs that only ancient
religions were in harmony with nature, and ancient science embraced all that
can be known.” [2]
Once more the prophecy already made in Isis Unveiled twenty-two
years ago [3] is reiterated.
“Secrets long kept may be revealed; books long forgotten and arts long
time lost may be brought out to light again; papyri and parchments of
inestimable importance will turn up in the hands of men who pretend to have
unrolled them from mummies, or stumbled upon them in buried crypts; tablets and
pillars, whose sculptured revelations will stagger theologians and confound
scientists, may yet be excavated and interpreted. Who knows the possibilities
of the future? An era of disenchantment and rebuilding will soon begin - nay,
has already begun. The cycle has almost run its course; a new one is about to
begin, and the future pages of history may contain full evidence, and convey
full proof of the above.” [4]
Since the day that this was written much of it has come to pass, the discovery of the Assyrian clay tiles and their records alone
having forced the interpreters of the cuneiform inscriptions - both Christians
and Freethinkers - to alter the very age of the world. [5]
The chronology of the Hindu Puranas, reproduced in The Secret
Doctrine, is now derided, but the time may come when it will be
universally accepted. This may be regarded as simply an assumption, but it will
be so only for the present. It is in truth but a question of time. The whole
issue of the quarrel between the defenders of ancient wisdom and its detractors
- lay and clerical - rests (a) on the incorrect comprehension of the old
philosophies, for the lack of the keys the Assyriologists boast of having
discovered; and (b) on the materialistic and anthropomorphic tendencies
of the age. This in no wise prevents the Darwinists and materialistic
philosophers from digging into the intellectual mines of the ancients and
helping themselves to the wealth of ideas they find in them; nor the divines
from discovering Christian dogmas in Plato’s philosophy and calling them “presentiments”,
as in Dr. Lundy’s Monumental Christianity, and other like modern works.
Of such “presentiments” the whole literature - or what remains of this
sacerdotal literature - of India, Egypt, Chaldea, Persia, Greece and even of
Guatemala (Popol Vuh), is full. Based on the same foundation-stone
- the ancient Mysteries - the primitive religions, all without one exception,
reflect the most important of the once universal beliefs, such, for instance,
as an impersonal and universal divine Principle, absolute in its nature, and
unknowable to the “brain” intellect, or the conditioned and limited cognition
of man. To imagine any witness to it in the manifested universe, other than as
Universal Mind, the Soul of the universe - is impossible. That which alone
stands as an undying and ceaseless evidence and proof of the existence of that
One Principle, is the presence of an undeniable design in kosmic mechanism, the
birth, growth, death and transformation of everything in the universe, from the
silent and unreachable stars down to the humble lichen, from man to the
invisible lives now called microbes. Hence the universal acceptation of “Thought
Divine”, the Anima Mundi of all antiquity. This idea of Mahat (the great) Akasha
or Brahma’s aura of transformation with the Hindus, of Alaya, “the divine Soul
of thought and compassion” of the trans-Himalayan mystics; of Plato’s “perpetually
reasoning Divinity”, is the oldest of all the doctrines now known to, and
believed in, by man. Therefore they cannot be said to have originated with
Plato, nor with Pythagoras, nor with any of the philosophers within the
historical period. Say the Chaldean Oracles: “The works of nature co-exist with the intellectual, spiritual
Light of the Father. For it is the Soul which adorned the great heaven, and
which adorns it after the Father”.
“The incorporeal world then was already completed, having its seat in
the Divine Reason”, says Philo, who is erroneously accused of deriving his
philosophy from Plato.
In the Theogony of Mochus, we find Ether first, and then the air; the
two principles from which Ulom, the intelligible God (the visible
universe of matter) is born.
In the Orphic hymns, the Eros-Phanes evolves from the Spiritual Egg,
which the ethereal winds impregnate, wind being “the Spirit of God”, who is
said to move in ether, “brooding over the Chaos” - the Divine “Idea”. In the hindu
Kathopanishad, Purusha,
the Divine Spirit, stands before the original Matter; from their union springs
the great Soul of the World, “Maha-Atma, Brahm, the Spirit of Life”; these
latter appellations are identical with the Universal Soul, or Anima Mundi, and
the Astral Light of the Theurgists and Kabalists.
Pythagoras brought his doctrines from the eastern sanctuaries, and Plato
compiled them into a form more intelligible than the mysterious numerals of the
Sage - whose doctrines he had fully embraced - to the uninitiated mind. Thus,
the Kosmos is “the Son” with Plato, having for his father and mother the Divine
Thought and Matter. The “Primal Being” (Beings, with the Theosophists,
as they are the collective aggregation of the divine Rays), is an emanation of
the Demiurgic or Universal Mind which contains from eternity the idea of the “to
be created world” within itself, which idea the unmanifested LOGOS produces of
Itself. The first Idea “born in darkness before the creation of the world”
remains in the unmanifested Mind; the second is this Idea going out as a
reflection from the Mind (now the manifested LOGOS), becoming clothed with
matter, and assuming an objective existence.
[1] Note by H.P. Blavatsky: See the Hibbert Lectures for
1887, pages 14-17, on the origin and growth of the religion of the ancient
Babylonians, where Prof. A. H. Sayce says that though “many of the sacred texts
were so written as to be intelligible only to the initiate [italics
mine] …… provided with keys and glosses”, nevertheless, as many of the latter,
he adds, “are in our hands”, they (the Orientalists) have “a clue to the
interpretation of these documents which even the initiated priests did not
possess”. (p. 17.) This “clue” is the modern craze, so dear to Mr.
Gladstone, and so stale in its monotony to most, which consists in perceiving
in every symbol of the religions of old a solar myth, dragged down, whenever
opportunity requires, to a sexual or phallic emblem. Hence the statement that
while “Gisdhubar was but a champion and conqueror of old times”, for the
Orientalists, who “can penetrate beneath the myths” he is but a solar hero, who
was himself but the transformed descendant of a humbler God of Fire (loc.
cit. p. 17).
[2] The above
quotation is from “Isis Unveiled”,
original edition, volume I, p. 38. (CCA)
[3] The expression
“22 years ago” is a misreading of the HPB originals and handwriting. The
present article was first published in September 1896, five years after
HPB’s death. Since the present transcription says that “Isis” was published “22
years ago”, and considering that “Isis” was published in 1877, then “The Mind
in Nature” would have to be written by HPB in 1899, that is, eight years after
her death in 1891 and three years after its actual publication in 1896. The
transcriber must have mistaken “twelve” for “twenty-two” in H.P.B.’s
handwriting. If the true information is “twelve years ago”, as it seems to be, the
present article was written in 1889. (CCA)
[4] This quotation
is still from “Isis”, volume I, p. 38. (CCA)
[5] Note by H. P. Blavatsky: Sargon,
the first “Semitic” monarch of Babylonia, the prototype and original of Moses,
is now placed 3,750 years B.C. (p. 21), and the Third Dynasty of Egypt “some
6,000 years ago”, hence some years before the world was created, agreeably to
Biblical chronology. (Vide Hibbert Lectures on Babylonia, by A.
H. Sayce, 1887, pp. 21 and 33.)
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The above article is reproduced from the October 2012 edition of “The Aquarian Theosophist”. It can also
be found in the volume II of “Theosophical Articles”, by Helena P. Blavatsky
(Theosophy Co., Los Angeles, pp. 217-222). “The Mind in Nature” was first published in “Lucifer” magazine, London, September, 1896. The word Lucifer means “Light-Bringer” and is the ancient name of the planet Venus, the “morning star”. Since the
Middle Ages, the term has been distorted by a number of ill-advised priests.
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In September 2016, after
a careful analysis of the state of the esoteric movement worldwide, a group of students
decided to form the Independent Lodge of
Theosophists, whose priorities include the building of a better future in
the different dimensions of life.
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