Section X. On the Elements and Atoms.
When the Occultist speaks of Elements, and of human Beings who lived during those geological ages, the duration of which it is found as impossible to determine—according to the opinion of one of the best English Geologists[960]—as the nature of Matter, it is because he knows what he is talking about. When he says Man and Elements, he means neither man in his present physiological and anthropological form, nor the elemental Atoms, those hypothetical conceptions, existing at present in scientific minds, the entitative abstractions of Matter in its highly attenuated state; nor, again, does he mean the compound Elements of Antiquity. In Occultism the word Element in every case means Rudiment. When we say “Elementary Man,” we mean either the proëmial, incipient sketch of man, in its unfinished and undeveloped condition, hence in that form which now lies latent in physical man during his life-time, and takes shape only occasionally and under certain conditions; or, that form which for a time survives the material body, and which is better known as an Elementary.[961] With regard to Element, when the term is used metaphysically, it means, in distinction to the mortal, the incipient Divine Man; and, in its physical usage, it means inchoate Matter in its first undifferentiated condition, or in the Laya state, the eternal and normal condition of Substance, which differentiates only periodically; during that differentiation, Substance is really in an abnormal state—in other words, it is but a transitory illusion of the senses.
As to the Elemental Atoms, so-called, the Occultists refer to them by that name with a meaning analogous to that which is given by [pg 620] the Hindû to Brahmâ, when he calls him Anu, the Atom. Every Elemental Atom, in search of which more than one Chemist has followed the path indicated by the Alchemists, is, in their firm belief, when not knowledge, a Soul; not necessarily a disembodied Soul, but a Jîva, as the Hindûs call it, a centre of Potential Vitality, with latent intelligence in it, and, in the case of compound Souls, an intelligent active Existence, from the highest to the lowest order, a form composed of more or less differentiations. It requires a Metaphysician—and an Eastern Metaphysician—to understand our meaning. All those Atom-Souls are differentiations from the One, and are in the same relation to it as is the Divine Soul, Buddhi, to its informing and inseparable Spirit, Âtmâ.
Modern Physics, in borrowing from the Ancients their Atomic Theory, forgot one point, the most important point of the doctrine; hence they have got only the husks and will never be able to get the kernel. In adopting physical Atoms, they omitted the suggestive fact that, from Anaxagoras to Epicurus, to the Roman Lucretius, and finally even to Galileo, all these Philosophers believed more or less in animated Atoms, not in invisible specks of so-called “brute” matter. According to them, rotatory motion was generated by larger (read, more divine and pure) Atoms forcing other Atoms downwards; the lighter ones being simultaneously thrust upward. The Esoteric meaning of this is the ever cyclic curve of differentiated Elements downward and upward through intercyclic phases of existence, until each again reaches its starting-point or birthplace. The idea was metaphysical as well as physical; the hidden interpretation embracing Gods or Souls, in the shape of Atoms, as the causes of all the effects produced on Earth by the secretions from the divine bodies.[962] No Ancient Philosopher, not even the Jewish Kabalists, ever dissociated Spirit from Matter, or Matter from Spirit. Everything originated in the One, and, proceeding from the One, must finally return to the One.
Light becomes heat, and consolidates into fiery particles; which, from being ignited, become cold, hard particles, round and smooth. And this is called Soul, imprisoned in its robe of matter.[963]
Atoms and Souls were synonymous in the language of the Initiates. The doctrine of “whirling Souls,” Gilgoolem, in which so many learned Jews have believed,[964] had no other meaning esoterically. The [pg 621] learned Jewish Initiates never meant Palestine alone by the Promised Land, but they meant the same Nirvâna as do the learned Buddhist and Brahman—the bosom of the Eternal One, symbolized by that of Abraham, and by Palestine as its substitute on Earth.
Surely no educated Jew ever believed this allegory in its literal sense, that the bodies of Jews contain within them a principle of Soul which cannot rest, if the bodies are deposited in a foreign land, until, by a process called the “whirling of the Soul” the immortal particle reaches once more the sacred soil of the “Promised Land.”[965] The meaning of this is evident to an Occultist. The process was supposed to be accomplished by a kind of metempsychosis, the psychic spark being conveyed through bird, beast, fish, and the most minute insect.[966] The allegory relates to the Atoms of the body, each of which has to pass through every form, before all reach the final state, which is the first starting-point of the departure of every Atom—its primitive Laya state. But the primitive meaning of Gilgoolem, or the “Revolution of Souls,” was the idea of the reïncarnating Souls or Egos. “All the Souls go into the Gilgoolah,” into a cyclic or revolving process; i.e., they all proceed on the cyclic path of re-births. Some Kabalists interpret this doctrine to mean only a kind of purgatory for the souls of the wicked. But this is not so.
The passage of the Soul-Atom “through the seven Planetary Chambers” had the same metaphysical and physical meaning. It had the latter when it was said to dissolve into Ether. Even Epicurus, the model Atheist and Materialist, knew so much and believed so much in the ancient Wisdom, that he taught that the Soul—entirely distinct from immortal Spirit, when the former is enshrined latent in it, as it is in every atomic speck—was composed of a fine, tender essence, formed from the smoothest, roundest, and finest atoms.[967]
And this shows that the ancient Initiates, who were followed more or less closely by all profane Antiquity, meant by the term Atom, a Soul, a Genius or Angel, the first-born of the ever-concealed Cause of all causes; and in this sense their teachings become comprehensible. They asserted, as do their successors, the existence of Gods and Genii, Angels or Demons, not outside, nor independent of, the Universal Plenum, but within it. Only this Plenum, during the life-cycles, is infinite. They admitted and taught a good deal of that which modern Science now teaches—namely, the existence of a primordial World-Stuff [pg 622] or Cosmic Substance, eternally homogeneous, except during its periodic existence; then, universally diffused throughout infinite Space, it differentiates, and gradually forms sidereal bodies from itself. They taught the revolution of the Heavens, the Earth's rotation, the Heliocentric System, and the Atomic Vortices—Atoms being in reality Souls and Intelligences. These “Atomists” were spiritual, most transcendental, and philosophical Pantheists. It is not they who would have ever conceived or dreamed that monstrous contrasted progeny, the nightmare of our modern civilized race: inanimate material and self-guiding Atoms, on the one hand, and an extra-cosmic God on the other.