Pythagoras was chaste, but far from commanding celibacy to his disciples he married on his own part and had children. A beautiful saying of his wife has remained in memory: she had been asked whether purification was not requisite in a woman after intercourse with a man, and in such case after what lapse of time she might regard herself as sufficiently purified to approach holy things. She replied: “Immediately, if it be with her husband; but if it be with another, never.”
The same severity of principles, the same purity of manners, qualified in the school of Pythagoras for initiation into the mysteries of Nature and so was attained that empire over self by which the elementary powers could be governed. Pythagoras possessed the faculty which by us is termed second sight and was known then as divination. Being with his disciples one day on the seashore, a vessel appeared on the horizon. “Master,” said one of the companions, “would it mean wealth if they gave me the cargo carried by that ship?” “To you it would be more than useless,” Pythagoras answered. “In such case I would keep it for my heirs.” “Would you wish to bequeathe them two corpses?” The vessel came into port and proved to be bearing the body of a man who desired to be buried in his own country.
It is related furthermore that beasts were obedient to Pythagoras. Once in the middle of the Olympic Games, he signalled to an eagle winging its way through heaven; the bird descended, wheeling circle-wise, and again took rapid flight at the master’s token of dismissal. There was also a great bear, ravaging in Apulia; Pythagoras brought it to his feet and told it to leave the country. It disappeared accordingly and when asked to what knowledge he owed such a marvellous power, he answered: “To the science of light.” Animated beings are, in fact, incarnations of light. Out of the darkness of ugliness forms emerge and move progressively towards the splendours of beauty; instincts are in correspondence with forms; and man who is the synthesis of that light whereof animals may be termed the analysis, is created to command them. It has come about, however, that in place of ruling as their master, he has become their persecutor and destroyer, so that they fear and have rebelled against him. In the presence of an exceptional will which is at once benevolent and directing they are completely magnetised, and a host of modern phenomena both can and should enable us to understand the possibility of miracles like those of Pythagoras.
Physiognomists have observed that the majority of men have a certain facial resemblance to one or another animal. It may be a matter of imagination only, produced by the impression to which various physiognomies give rise, and revealing some prominent personal characteristics. A morose man is thus reminiscent of a bear, a hypocrite has the look of a cat, and so of the rest. These kinds of judgments are magnified in the imagination and exaggerated still further in dreams, when people who have affected us disagreeably during the waking state transform into animals and cause us to experience all the agonies of nightmare. Now, animals—as much as ourselves and more even than we—are under the rule of imagination, while they are devoid of that judgment by which we can check its errors. Hence they are affected towards us according to the sympathies or antipathies which are excited by our own magnetism. They are, moreover, unconscious of that which underlies the human form and they regard us only as other animals by whom they are dominated, the dog taking his master for a dog more perfect than himself. The secret of dominion over animals lies in the management of this instinct. We have seen a famous tamer of wild beasts fascinate his lions by exhibiting a terrible countenance and acting himself as if he were a lion enraged. Here is a literal application of the popular proverb which tells us to howl with the wolves and bleat with the sheep. It must also be realised that every animal form manifests a particular instinct, aptitude or vice. If we suffer the character of the beast to predominate within us, we shall tend to assume its external guise in an ever-increasing degree and shall even come to impress its perfect image on the Astral Light; more even than this, when we fall into dreams or ecstasy, we shall see ourselves as ecstatics and somnambulists would see us and as we must appear undoubtedly in the eyes of animals. Let it happen in such cases that reason be extinguished, that persistent dreams change into madness, and we shall be turned into beasts like Nebuchadnezzar. This explains those stories of were-wolves, some of which have been legally established. The facts were beyond dispute, but the witnesses were not less hallucinated than the were-wolves themselves.[60]
Cases of coincidence and correspondence in the dream-state are neither rare nor extraordinary. Persons in the state of magnetic ecstasy can see and talk to one another from opposite ends of the earth. We ourselves may meet someone for the first time and he or she will seem to be an old acquaintance because we have encountered frequently in dream. Life is full of these curious occurrences and as regards the transformation of human beings into animals, the evidences are on every side. How many aged courtesans and gluttonous females, reduced almost to idiocy after threading all sewers of existence, are nothing but old she-cats egregiously enamoured of their tom.
Pythagoras believed above all things in the soul’s immortality and in the perpetuity of life. The endless succession of summer and winter, day and night, sleeping and waking, illustrated amply for him the phenomenon of death. For him also the particular immortality of human souls consisted in persistence of memory. He is said to have been conscious of his previous incarnations and if the report is true, it was something suggested by his reminiscences, for such a man as he could have been neither impostor nor fool.[61] It is probable that he came upon former memories in his dreams, while simple speculation and hypothesis have been constructed as positive affirmation on his part. However this may be, his thought was great, for the real life of our individuality consists in memory alone. Those waters of Lethe pictured by the ancients were the true philosophical type of death. The Bible appears to impart a divine sanction to this idea when it is said in the Book of Psalms that “the just shall be in everlasting remembrance.”[62]
CHAPTER VII
THE HOLY KABALAH
Let us now have recourse to the origin of true science by recurring to the Holy Kabalah, or tradition of the children of Seth, taken from Chaldea by Abraham, communicated by Joseph to the Egyptian priesthood, ingarnered by Moses, concealed by symbols in the Bible, revealed by the Saviour to St. John, and embodied in its fulness in hieratic images, analogous to those of all antiquity, in the Apocalypse of this Apostle.
Whatsoever was in kinship with idolatry was held in detestation by the Kabalists, which notwithstanding, God is represented by them under a human figure, but it is purely hieroglyphical. For them He is the intelligent, the loving, the living infinite. He is neither the totality of all beings, nor being in abstraction, nor a being who is philosophically definable. He is in all things, being more and greater than all. His very name is ineffable, and yet this name gives expression only to the human ideal of His divinity.[63] It is not possible for man to understand God in Himself. He is the absolute of faith, but the absolute of reason is Being. Being is self-existent and is because it is. The cause of Being is Being itself. It is matter of legitimate speculation why this or that exists, but it would be absurd to inquire why Being is, for it would be to postulate Being as antecedent to Being.
It is demonstrated by reason and science that the modes of existence in Being are equilibrated in accordance with harmonious and hierarchic laws. Now the hierarchy is graduated on an ascending scale, becoming more and more monarchic. At the same time reason cannot pause in the presence of one absolute chief without being overwhelmed by the heights which it discerns above this supreme king; it takes refuge therefore in silence and gives place to adoring faith. That which is certain, for science and for reason alike, is that the idea of God is the grandest, most holy and most serviceable of all aspirations in man; that morality and its eternal sanction repose on this belief. In humanity it is therefore the most real phenomenon of being, and if it were false therefore, Nature would formulate the absurd, the void would affirm life, and it might be said at one and the same time that there was God and there was no God. It is to this philosophical and incontestable reality, or otherwise the notion of Deity, that the Kabalists give a name, and all other names are contained therein.[64] The ciphers of this name produce all numbers and the hieroglyphical forms of its letters give expression to all laws of Nature, with all that is therein. We shall not recur in this place to that which has been dealt with already as regards the divine Tetragram in the Doctrine of Transcendental Magic; but it may be added that the Kabalists inscribe it in four chief ways: (1) as יהוה , JHVH, which is spelt but not pronounced. The consonants are YOD, HE, VAU, HE, and they are rendered as JEHOVAH by us in opposition to all analogy, for the Tetragrammaton so disfigured is composed of six letters.[65] (2) אדני, ADNI, meaning Lord and pronounced by us ADONAI.[66] (3) אהיה AHIH, which signifies Being and is pronounced by
us EIEIE.[67] (4) אגלא, AGLA, pronounced as it is written and comprising hieroglyphically all mysteries of the Kabalah.[68]