Therefore, it is not only from the Mosaic books that we mean to adduce proof for our further arguments. The ancient Jews got all their knowledge—religious as well as profane—from the nations with which we see them mixed up from the earliest periods. Even the oldest of all sciences, their kabalistic “secret doctrine,” may be traced in each detail to its primeval source, Upper India, or Turkestan, far before the time of a distinct separation between the Aryan and Semitic nations. The King Solomon so celebrated by posterity, as Josephus the historian says,[250] for his magical skill, got his secret learning from India through Hiram, the king of Ophir, and perhaps Sheba. His ring, commonly known as “Solomon’s seal,” so celebrated for the potency of its sway over the various kinds of genii and demons, in all the popular legends, is equally of Hindu origin. Writing on the pretentious and abominable skill of the “devil-worshippers” of Travancore, the Rev. Samuel Mateer, of the London Missionary Society, claims at the same time to be in possession of a very old manuscript volume of magical incantations and spells in the Malayâlim language, giving directions for effecting a great variety of purposes. Of course he adds, that “many of these are fearful in their malignity and obscenity,” and gives in his work the fac-simile of some amulets bearing the magical figures and designs on them. We find among them one with the following legend: “To remove trembling arising from demoniacal possession—write this figure on a plant that has milky juice, and drive a nail through it; the trembling will cease.”[251] The figure is the identical Solomon’s seal, or double triangle of the Kabalists. Did the Hindu get it from the Jewish kabalist, or the latter from India, by inheritance from their great king-kabalist, the wise Solomon?[252] But we will leave this trifling dispute to continue the more interesting question of the astral light, and its unknown properties.
Admitting, then, that this mythical agent is Ether, we will proceed to see what and how much of it is known to science.
With respect to the various effects of the different solar rays, Robert Hunt, F.R.S., remarks, in his Researches on Light in its Chemical Relations, that:
“Those rays which give the most light—the yellow and the orange rays—will not produce change of color in the chloride of silver;” while “those rays which have the least illuminating power—the blue and violet—produce the greatest change, and in exceedingly short time.... The yellow glasses obstruct scarcely any light; the blue glasses may be so dark as to admit of the permeation of a very small quantity.”
And still we see that under the blue ray both vegetable and animal life manifest an inordinate development, while under the yellow ray it is proportionately arrested. How is it possible to account for this satisfactorily upon any other hypothesis than that both animal and vegetable life are differently modified electrico-magnetic phenomena, as yet unknown in their fundamental principles?
Mr. Hunt finds that the undulatory theory does not account for the results of his experiments. Sir David Brewster, in his Treatise on Optics, showing that “the colors of vegetable life arise ... from a specific attraction which the particles of these bodies exercise over the differently-colored rays of light,” and that “it is by the light of the sun that the colored juices of plants are elaborated, that the colors of bodies are changed, etc....” remarks that it is not easy to allow “that such effects can be produced by the mere vibration of an ethereal medium.” And he is forced, he says, “by this class of facts, to reason as if light was material(?).” Professor Josiah P. Cooke, of Harvard University, says that he “cannot agree ... with those who regard the wave-theory of light as an established principle of science.”[253] Herschel’s doctrine, that the intensity of light, in effect of each undulation, “is inversely as the square of the distance from the luminous body,” if correct, damages a good deal if it does not kill the undulatory theory. That he is right, was proved repeatedly by experiments with photometers; and, though it begins to be much doubted, the undulatory theory is still alive.
As General Pleasanton, of Philadelphia, has undertaken to combat this anti-Pythagorean hypothesis, and has devoted to it a whole volume, we cannot do any better than refer the reader to his recent work on the Blue Ray, etc. We leave the theory of Thomas Young, who, according to Tyndall, “placed on an immovable basis the undulatory theory of light,” to hold its own if it can, with the Philadelphia experimenter.
Eliphas Levi, the modern magician, describes the astral light in the following sentence: “We have said that to acquire magical power, two things are necessary: to disengage the will from all servitude, and to exercise it in control.”
“The sovereign will is represented in our symbols by the woman who crushes the serpent’s head, and by the resplendent angel who represses the dragon, and holds him under his foot and spear; the great magical agent, the dual current of light, the living and astral fire of the earth, has been represented in the ancient theogonies by the serpent with the head of a bull, a ram, or a dog. It is the double serpent of the caduceus, it is the Old Serpent of the Genesis, but it is also the brazen serpent of Moses entwined around the tau, that is to say, the generative lingha. It is also the goat of the witch-sabbath, and the Baphomet of the Templars; it is the Hylé of the Gnostics; it is the double-tail of serpent which forms the legs of the solar cock of the Abraxas; finally, it is the Devil of M. Eudes de Mirville. But in very fact it is the blind force which souls have to conquer to liberate themselves from the bonds of the earth; for if their will does not free “them from this fatal attraction, they will be absorbed in the current by the force which has produced them, and will return to the central and eternal fire.”
This last kabalistic figure of speech, notwithstanding its strange phraseology, is precisely the one used by Jesus; and in his mind it could have had no other significance than the one attributed to it by the Gnostics and the Kabalists. Later the Christian theologians interpreted it differently, and with them it became the doctrine of Hell. Literally, though, it simply means what it says—the astral light, or the generator and destroyer of all forms.