The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 of 4 / The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy

by H. P. Blavatsky

Let us now return to the Life-Cycle. Without entering at length upon the description given of the Higher Lives, we must direct our attention, at present, simply to the earthly Beings and the Earth itself. The latter, we are told, is built up for the First Round by the “Devourers,” which disintegrate and differentiate the germs of other Lives in the Elements; pretty much, it must be supposed, as in the present stage of the world, the ærobes do, when, undermining and loosening the chemical structure in an organism, they transform animal matter, and generate substances that vary in their constitutions. Thus Occultism disposes of the so-called Azoic Age of Science, for it shows that there never was a time when the Earth was without life upon it. Wherever there is an atom of matter, a particle, or a molecule, even in its most gaseous condition, there is life in it, however latent and unconscious.

Whatsoever quits the Laya State, becomes active Life; it is drawn into the vortex of Motion [the Alchemical Solvent of Life]; Spirit and Matter are [pg 279]the two States of the One, which is neither Spirit nor Matter, both being the Absolute Life, latent.... Spirit is the first differentiation of [and in] Space; and Matter the first differentiation of Spirit. That, which is neither Spirit nor Matter, That is IT—the Causeless Cause of Spirit and Matter, which are the Cause of Kosmos. And THAT we call the One Life, or the Intra-Cosmic Breath.[407]

Once more we say—like must produce like. Absolute Life cannot produce an inorganic atom, whether single or complex, and there is life even in Laya, just as a man in a profound cataleptic state—to all appearance a corpse—is still a living being.

When the “Devourers”—in whom the men of Science are invited to see, with some show of reason, atoms of the Fire-Mist, if they will, as the Occultist will offer no objection to this—when the “Devourers,” we say, have differentiated the “Fire Atoms,” by a peculiar process of segmentation, the latter become Life-Germs, which aggregate according to the laws of cohesion and affinity. Then the Life-Germs produce Lives of another kind, which work on the structure of our Globes.

Thus, in the First Round, the Globe, having been built by the primitive Fire-Lives—i.e., formed into a sphere—had no solidity, no qualifications, save a cold brightness, no form, no colour; it is only towards the end of the First Round that it developed one Element, which, from its inorganic, so to say, or simple Essence, has become now, in our Round, the fire we know throughout the System. The Earth was in her first Rûpa, the essence of which is the Âkâshic Principle named ——, that which is now known as, and very erroneously termed, Astral Light, which Éliphas Lévi calls the “Imagination of Nature,” probably to avoid giving it its correct name, as others do.

Speaking of it, in his Preface to the Histoire de la Magie, Éliphas Lévi says:

It is through this Force that all the nervous centres secretly communicate with each other; from it—that sympathy and antipathy are born; from it—that we have our dreams; and that the phenomena of second sight and extra-natural visions take place.... Astral Light [acting under the impulsion of powerful wills] ... destroys, coagulates, separates, breaks, gathers in all things.... God created it on that day when he said: “Fiat Lux!” ... It is directed by the Egregores, i.e., the chiefs of the souls, who are the spirits of energy and action.[408]

Éliphas Lévi ought to have added that the Astral Light, or Primordial Substance, if matter at all, is that which, called Light, Lux esoterically [pg 280] explained, is the body of those Spirits themselves, and their very essence. Our physical light is the manifestation on our plane, and the reflected radiance, of the Divine Light, emanating from the collective Body of those who are called the “Lights” and the “Flames.” But no other Kabalist has ever had the talent of heaping up one contradiction on the other, of making one paradox chase another in the same sentence, and in such flowing language, as Éliphas Lévi. He leads his reader through the most lovely valleys, to strand him after all on a desert and barren rock.

Says the Commentary:

It is through and from the radiations of the seven Bodies of the seven Orders of Dhyânis, that the seven Discrete Quantities [Elements], whose Motion and harmonious Union produce the manifested Universe of Matter, are born.