Footnotes
[1.] See Theosophist, June, 1883. [2.] Preface to the original edition. [3.] Dan, in modern Chinese and Tibetan phonetics Chhan, is the general term for the esoteric schools and their literature. In the old books, the word Janna is defined as “reforming one's self by meditation and knowledge,” a second inner birth. Hence Dzan, Djan phonetically; the Book of Dzyan. See Edkins, Chinese Buddhism, p. 129, note. [4.] Mr. Beglor, the chief engineer at Buddhagâya, and a distinguished archæologist, was the first, we believe, to discover it. [5.] See Isis Unveiled, Vol. II, p. 27. [6.] Introduction to the Science of Religion, p. 23. [7.] Ain í Akbari, translated by Dr. Blochmann, quoted by Max Müller, op. cit. [8.] Tao-te-King, p. xxvii. [9.] Max Müller, op. cit., p. 114. [10.] Found out and proven only now, through the discoveries made by George Smith (see his Chaldean Account of Genesis), and which, thanks to this Armenian forger, have misled all the “civilized nations” for over 1,500 years into accepting Jewish derivations for direct Divine Revelation. [11.] Egypt's Place in History, i. 200. [12.] Spence Hardy, The Legends and Theories of the Buddhists, p. 66. [13.] E. Schlagintweit, Buddhism in Tibet, p. 77. [14.] Lassen (Ind. Althersumkunde, II, 1,072) shows a Buddhist monastery erected in the Kailâs. Range in 137 b.c.; and General Cunningham, one earlier than that. [15.] Rev. J. Edkins, Chinese Buddhism, p. 87. [16.] See, for example, Max Müller's Lectures. [17.] Op. cit., p. 118. [18.] Op. cit., p. 318. [19.] Asiatic Researches, I, 272. [20.] See Max Müller, op. cit., pp. 288 et seq. This relates to the clever forgery, on leaves inserted in old Purânic MSS., and written in correct and archaic Sanskrit, of all that the Pandits had heard from Colonel Wilford about Adam and Abraham, Noah and his three sons, etc., etc. [21.] From a lecture by N. M. Prjevalsky. [22.] Lün-Yü (§ I a); Schott, Chinesische Literatur, p. 7; quoted by Max Müller. [23.] Life and Teachings of Confucius, p. 96. [24.] Op. cit., p. 257. [25.] The name is used in the sense of the Greek word ἅνθρωπς. [26.] Rabbi Jehoshua Ben Chananea, who died about a.d. 72, openly declared that he had performed “miracles” by means of the book Sepher Jetzirah, and challenged every sceptic. Franck, quoting from the Babylonian Talmud, names two other thaumaturgists, Rabbis Chanina and Oshoi. (See Jerusalem Talmud, Sanhedrin, c. 7, etc.; and Franck, Die Kabbalah, pp. 55, 56). Many of the mediæval Occultists, Alchemists, and Kabalists have made the same claim; and even the late modern Magus, Éliphas Lévi, publicly asserts it in his books on Magic. [27.] It is hardly necessary to remind the reader that the term Divine Thought, like that of Universal Mind, must not be regarded as even vaguely shadowing forth an intellectual process akin to that exhibited by man. The “Unconscious,” according to von Hartmann, arrived at the vast creative, or rather evolutionary plan, “by a clairvoyant wisdom superior to all consciousness,” which in Vedântic language would mean absolute Wisdom. Only those who realize how far intuition soars above the tardy processes of ratiocinative thought can form the faintest conception of that absolute Wisdom which transcends the ideas of Time and Space. Mind, as we know it, is resolvable into states of consciousness, of varying duration, intensity, complexity, etc., all, in the ultimate, resting on sensation, which is again Mâyâ. Sensation, again, necessarily postulates limitation. The Personal God of orthodox Theism perceives, thinks, and is affected by emotion; he repents and feels “fierce anger.” But the notion of such mental states clearly involves the unthinkable postulate of the externality of the exciting stimuli, to say nothing of the impossibility of ascribing changelessness to a being whose emotions fluctuate with events in the worlds he presides over. The conceptions of a Personal God as changeless and infinite are thus unpsychological and, what is worse, unphilosophical. [28.] Plato proves himself an Initiate, when saying in Cratylus that θεός is derived from θέειν, to move, to run, for the first astronomers who observed the motions of the heavenly bodies called the planets θεοί, gods. Later the word produced another term, ἀλήθεια—the breath of God. [29.] Nominalists, arguing with Berkeley that “it is impossible ... to form the abstract idea of motion distinct from the body moving” (Principles of Human Knowledge, Introd., par. 10), may put the question, What is that body, the producer of that motion? Is it a substance? Then you are believers in a Personal God? etc., etc. This will be answered farther on, in a further part of this work; meanwhile, we claim our rights of Conceptionalists as against Roscelini's materialistic views of Realism and Nominalism. “Has science,” says one of its ablest advocates, Edward Clodd, “revealed anything that weakens or opposes itself to the ancient words in which the essence of all religion, past, present, and to come, is given; to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly before thy God?” And we agree, provided we connote by the word God, not the crude anthropomorphism which is still the backbone of our current theology, but the symbolic conception of that which is the Life and Motion of the Universe, to know which in the physical order is to know time past, present, and to come, in the existence of successions of phenomena; to know which, in the moral, is to know what has been, is, and will be, within human consciousness. (See Science and the Emotions, a Discourse delivered at South Place Chapel, Finsbury, London, December 27th, 1885.) [30.] Isis Unveiled, II, 264-5. [31.] Rig Veda. [32.] We are told by the Western mathematicians and some American Kabalists, that in the Kabalah also “the value of the Jehovah name is that of the diameter of a circle.” Add to this the fact that Jehovah is the third of the Sephiroth, Binah, a feminine word, and you have the key to the mystery. By certain Kabalistic transformations this name, which is androgynous in the first chapters of Genesis, becomes in its transformations entirely masculine, Cainite and phallic. The choosing of a deity among the pagan gods and making of it a special national God, to call upon it as the “One Living God,” the “God of Gods,” and then proclaiming this worship monotheistic, does not change it into the One Principle whose “Unity admits not of multiplication, change, or form,” especially in the case of a priapic deity, as Jehovah is now demonstrated to be. [33.] See that suggestive work, The Source of Measures, where the author explains the real meaning of the word Sacr' from which “sacred,” “sacrament,” are derived, words which have now become synonyms of holiness, though purely phallic! [34.] Mândûkya Upanishad, I. 28. [35.] Bodhimür, Book II. [36.] See the Vedânta Sâra, by Major G. A. Jacob; and also The Aphorisms of Shândilya, translated by Cowell, p. 42. [37.] Aitareya Upanishad. [38.]
Nevertheless, prejudiced and rather fanatical Christian Orientalists would like to prove this to be pure Atheism. For proof of this, compare Major Jacob's Vedânta Sâra. Yet, the whole of antiquity echoes the thought:
Omnis enim per se divom natura necesse est
Immortali ævo summa cum pace fruatur—
as Lucretius has it—a purely Vedântic conception.
Occultism is indeed “in the air” at the close of this our century. Among many other works recently published, we would recommend especially to students of theoretical Occultism who would not venture beyond the realm of our special human plane, New Aspects of Life and Religion, by Henry Pratt, M.D. It is full of esoteric dogmas and philosophy, the latter, however, in the concluding chapters, rather limited by what seems to be a spirit of conditioned positivism. Nevertheless, what is said of Space as “the Unknown First Cause,” merits quotation.
“This unknown something, thus recognized as, and identified with, the primary embodiment of Simple Unity, is invisible and impalpable [as abstract space, granted]: and because invisible and impalpable, therefore incognizable. And this incognizability has led to the error of supposing it to be a simple void, a mere receptive capacity. But, even viewed as an absolute void, space must be admitted to be either self-existent, infinite, and eternal, or to have had a first cause outside, behind, and beyond itself.
“And yet could such a cause be found and defined, this would only lead to the transferring thereto of the attributes otherwise accruing to space, and thus merely throw the difficulty of origination a step farther back, without gaining additional light as to primary causation.” (Op. cit., p. 5.)
This is precisely what has been done by the believers in an anthropomorphic creator, an extra-cosmic, instead of an intra-cosmic God. Many of Dr. Pratt's subjects—most of them we may say—are old Kabalistic ideas and theories which he presents in quite a new garb—“New Aspects” of the Occult in Nature, indeed. Space, however, viewed as a Substantial Unity—the living Source of Life—is, as the Unknown Causeless Cause, the oldest dogma in Occultism, millenniums earlier than the Pater-Æther of the Greeks and Latins. So are “Force and Matter, as Potencies of Space, inseparable, and the unknown revealers of the Unknown.” They are all found in Âryan philosophy personified as Vishvakarman, Indra, Vishnu, etc., etc. Still they are expressed very philosophically, and under many unusual aspects, in the work referred to.
In a recent work on Symbolism in Buddhism and Christianity—in Buddhism and Roman Catholicism, rather, many later rituals and dogmas in Northern Buddhism, in its popular exoteric form, being identical with those of the Latin Church—some curious facts are to be found. The author of this volume, with more pretensions than erudition, has indiscriminately crammed into his work ancient and modern Buddhist teachings, and has sorely confused Lamaïsm with Buddhism. On page 404 of this volume, called Buddhism in Christendom, or Jesus the Essene, our pseudo-Orientalist devotes himself to criticizing the “Seven Principles” of the “Esoteric Buddhists,” and attempts to ridicule them. On page 405, the closing page, he speaks enthusiastically of the Vidyâdharas, “the seven great legions of dead men made wise.” Now, these Vidyâdharas, whom some Orientalists call “demi-gods,” are in fact, exoterically, a kind of Siddhas, “affluent in devotion,” and, esoterically, they are identical with the seven classes of Pitris, one class of which endow man in the Third Race with Self-consciousness, by incarnating in the human shells. The “Hymn to the Sun,” at the end of his queer volume of mosaic, which endows Buddhism with a Personal God (!!), is an unfortunate thrust at the very proofs so elaborately collected by the unlucky author.
Theosophists are fully aware that Mr. Rhys Davids has likewise expressed his opinion on their beliefs. He said that the theories propounded by the author of Esoteric Buddhism “were not Buddhism, and were not esoteric.” The remark is the result of (a) the unfortunate mistake of writing “Buddhism” instead of “Budhaïsm,” or “Budhism,” i.e., of connecting the system with Gautama's religion instead of with the Secret Wisdom taught by Krishna, Shankarâchârya, and many others, as much as by Buddha; and (b) of the impossibility of Mr. Rhys Davids knowing anything of the true Esoteric Teachings. Nevertheless as he is the greatest Pâli and Buddhist scholar of the day, whatever he may say is entitled to respectful hearing. But when one who knows no more of exoteric Buddhism on Scientific and Materialistic lines, than he knows of Esoteric Philosophy, defames those whom he honours with his spite, and assumes with the Theosophists the airs of a profound scholar, one can only smile or—heartily laugh at him.
This method of illustrating the periodic law in the classification of elements is, in the words of Mr. Crookes, proposed by Professor Emerson Reynolds, of Dublin University, who ... “points out that in each period, the general properties of the elements vary from one to another, with approximate regularity until we reach the seventh member, which is in more or less striking contrast with the first element of the same period, as well as with the first of the next. Thus chlorine, the seventh member of Mendeleef's third period, contrasts sharply with both sodium, the first member of the same series, and with potassium, the first member of the next series; whilst on the other hand, sodium and potassium are closely analogous. The six elements, whose atomic weights intervene between sodium and potassium, vary in properties, step by step, until chlorine, the contrast to sodium, is reached. But from chlorine to potassium, the analogue of sodium, there is a change in properties per saltum..... If we thus recognize a contrast in properties—more or less decided—between the first and the last members of each series, we can scarcely help admitting the existence of a point of mean variation within each system. In general the fourth element of each series possesses the property we might expect a transition-element to exhibit.... Thus for the purpose of graphic translation, Professor Reynolds considers that the fourth member of a period—silicon, for example—may be placed at the apex of a symmetrical curve, which shall represent for that particular period, the direction in which the properties of the series of elements vary with rising atomic weights.”
Now, the writer humbly confesses complete ignorance of modern Chemistry and its mysteries. But she is pretty well acquainted with the Occult Doctrine with regard to correspondences of types and antetypes in nature, and to perfect analogy as a fundamental law in Occultism. Hence she ventures on a remark which will strike every Occultist, however it may be derided by orthodox Science. This method of illustrating the periodic law in the behaviour of elements, whether or not still a hypothesis in Chemistry, is a law in Occult Sciences. Every well-read Occultist knows that the seventh and fourth members—whether in a septenary chain of worlds, the septenary hierarchy of angels, or in the constitution of man, animal, plant, or mineral atom—that the seventh and fourth members, we say, in the geometrically and mathematically uniform workings of the immutable laws of Nature, always play a distinct and specific part in the septenary system. From the stars twinkling high in heaven, to the sparks flying asunder from the rude fire built by the savage in his forest; from the hierarchies and the essential constitution of the Dhyân Chohans—organized for diviner apprehensions and a loftier range of perception than the greatest Western Psychologist ever dreamed of, down to Nature's classification of species among the humblest insects; finally from Worlds to Atoms, everything in the Universe, from great to small, proceeds in its spiritual and physical evolution, cyclically and septennially, showing its seventh and fourth number (the latter the turning point) behaving in the same way as is shown in that periodic law of Atoms. Nature never proceeds per saltum. Therefore, when Mr. Crookes remarks on this that he does not “wish to infer that the gaps in Mendeleef's table, and in this graphic representation of it [the diagram showing the evolution of Atoms] necessarily mean that there are elements actually existing to fill up the gaps; these gaps may only mean that at the birth of the elements there was an easy potentiality of the formation of an element which would fit into the place”—an Occultist would respectfully remark to him that the latter hypothesis can only hold good, if the septenary arrangement of Atoms is not interfered with. This is the one law, and an infallible method that must always lead one who follows it to success.
We refer those who would regard the statement as an impertinence or irreverence levelled at accepted Science, to Dr. James Hutchinson Stirling's work As regards Protoplasm, which is a defence of a Vital Principle versus the Molecularists—Huxley, Tyndall, Vogt, and Co.—and request them to examine whether it is true or not to say that, though the scientific premisses may not be always correct, they are, nevertheless, accepted, to fill up a gap or a hole in some beloved materialistic hobby. Speaking of protoplasm and the organs of man, as “viewed by Mr. Huxley,” the author says: “Probably then, in regard to any continuity in protoplasm of power, of form, or of substance, we have seen lacunæ enow. Nay, Mr. Huxley himself can be adduced in evidence on the same side. Not rarely do we find in his essay admissions of probability, where it is certainty that is alone in place. He says, for example: ‘It is more than probable that when the vegetable world is thoroughly explored we shall find all plants in possession of the same powers.’ When a conclusion is decidedly announced, it is rather disappointing to be told, as here, that the premisses are still to collect [!!].... Again, here is a passage in which he is seen to cut his own ‘basis’ from beneath his own feet. After telling us that all forms of protoplasm consist of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen ‘in very complex union,’ he continues: ‘To this complex combination, the nature of which has never been determined with exactness [!!], the name of protein has been applied.’ This, plainly, is an identification, on Mr. Huxley's own part, of protoplasm and protein; and what is said of one, being necessarily true of the other, it follows that he admits the nature of protoplasm never to have been determined with exactness, and that even in his eyes the lis is still sub judice. This admission is strengthened by the words, too, ‘If we use this term (protein) with such caution as may properly arise out of our comparative ignorance of the things for which it stands’ ” ... etc. (pp. 33 and 34, ed. 1872, in reply to Mr. Huxley in Yeast).
This is the eminent Huxley, the king of physiology and biology, who is proven playing at blind man's buff with premisses and facts! What may not the “smaller fry” of Science do after this!
Every scholar is aware, of course, that the Chaldeans claimed the same digits (432), or 432,000, for their Divine Dynasties as the Hindûs do for their Mahâyuga, namely 4,320,000. Therefore has Dr. Sepp, of Munich, undertaken to support Kepler and Wilford in their charge that the Hindûs borrowed them from the Christians, and the Chaldeans from the Jews, who, it is claimed, expected their Messiah in the lunar year of the world 4,320!!! As these figures, according to ancient writers, were based by Berosus on the 120 Saroses—each of the divisions meaning six Neroses of 600 years each, making a sum total of 432,000 years—they would appear to be peremptory, remarks De Mirville (Des Esprits, iii. p. 24). So the pious professor of Munich undertook to explain them in the correct way. He claims to have solved the riddle by showing that “the saros being composed, according to Pliny, of 222 synodial months, to wit, 18 years 6/10,” the calculator naturally fell back on the figures “given by Suidas,” who affirmed that the “120 saroses made 2,222 sacerdotal and cyclic years, which equalled 1,656 solar years.” (Vie de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ, ii. p. 417.)
But Suidas said nothing of the kind; and, even supposing he had, he would prove little, if anything, by such a statement. The Neroses and Saroses were the same thorn in the side of uninitiated ancient writers as the apocalyptic 666 of the “Great Beast” is in that of the modern, and the former figures have found their unlucky Newtons, as have the latter.