The Grand Cycle includes the progress of mankind from the appearance of primordial man of ethereal form. It runs through the inner Cycles of man's progressive evolution from the ethereal down to the semi-ethereal and purely physical; down to the redemption of man [pg 704] from his “coat of skin” and matter, after which it continues running its course downward and then upward again, to meet at the culmination of a Round, when the Manvantaric Serpent “swallows its tail” and seven Minor Cycles are passed. These are the great Racial Cycles which affect equally all the nations and tribes included in that special Race; but there are minor and national, as well as tribal, Cycles within these, which run their course independently of each other. They are called in Eastern Esotericism the Karmic Cycles. In the West—since Pagan Wisdom has been repudiated as having grown from and been developed by the Dark Powers, supposed to be at constant war with and in opposition to the little tribal Jehovah—the full and awful significance of the Greek Nemesis, or Karma, has been entirely forgotten. Otherwise Christians would have better realized the profound truth that Nemesis is without attributes; that while the dreaded Goddess is absolute and immutable as a Principle, it is we ourselves—nations and individuals—who propel it to action and give the impulse to its direction. Karma-Nemesis is the creator of nations and mortals, but once created, it is they who make of her either a Fury or a rewarding Angel. Yea—
Wise are they who worship Nemesis[1106]
—as the Chorus tells Prometheus. And as unwise they, who believe that the Goddess may be propitiated by any sacrifices and prayers, or have her wheel diverted from the path it has once taken. “The triform Fates and ever mindful Furies” are her attributes only on Earth, and begotten by ourselves. There is no return from the paths she cycles over; yet those paths are of our own making, for it is we, collectively or individually, who prepare them. Karma-Nemesis is the synonym of Providence, minus design, goodness, and every other finite attribute and qualification, so unphilosophically attributed to the latter. An Occultist or a Philosopher will not speak of the goodness or cruelty of Providence; but, identifying it with Karma-Nemesis, he will nevertheless teach that it guards the good and watches over them in this, as in future lives; and that it punishes the evil-doer—aye, even to his seventh rebirth—so long, indeed, as the effect of his having thrown into perturbation even the smallest atom in the Infinite World of Harmony has not been finally reädjusted. For the only decree of Karma—an eternal and immutable decree—is absolute Harmony in the [pg 705] world of Matter as it is in the world of Spirit. It is not, therefore, Karma that rewards or punishes, but it is we who reward or punish ourselves, according as we work with, through and along with Nature, abiding by the laws on which that harmony depends, or—breaking them.
Nor would the ways of Karma be inscrutable were men to work in union and harmony, instead of disunion and strife. For our ignorance of these ways—which one portion of mankind calls the ways of Providence, dark and intricate, while another sees in them the action of blind Fatalism, and a third, simple Chance, with neither Gods nor Devils to guide them—would surely disappear, if we would but attribute all of them to their correct cause. With right knowledge, or at any rate with a confident conviction that our neighbours would no more work to hurt us than we would think of harming them, two-thirds of the world's evil would vanish into thin air. Were no man to hurt his brother, Karma-Nemesis would have neither cause to work for, nor weapons to act through. It is the constant presence in our midst of every element of strife and opposition, and the division of races, nations, tribes, societies and individuals into Cains and Abels, wolves and lambs, that is the chief cause of the “ways of Providence.” We cut these numerous windings in our destinies daily with our own hands, while we imagine that we are pursuing a track on the royal high road of respectability and duty, and then we complain because these windings are so intricate and so dark. We stand bewildered before the mystery of our own making, and the riddles of life that we will not solve, and then accuse the great Sphinx of devouring us. But verily there is not an accident in our lives, not a misshapen day, or a misfortune, that could not be traced back to our own doings in this or in another life. If one breaks the laws of Harmony, or, as a theosophical writer expresses it, the “laws of life,” one must be prepared to fall into the chaos oneself has produced. For, according to the same writer:
The only conclusion one can come to is that these laws of life are their own avengers; and consequently that every avenging angel is only a typified representation of their reäction.
Therefore, if any one is helpless before these immutable laws, it is not ourselves, the artificers of our destinies, but rather those Angels, the guardians of Harmony. Karma-Nemesis is no more than the spiritual dynamical effect of causes produced, and forces awakened into activity, by our own actions. It is a law of Occult dynamics that [pg 706] “a given amount of energy expended on the spiritual or astral plane is productive of far greater results than the same amount expended on the physical objective plane of existence.”
This condition of things will last till man's spiritual intuitions are fully opened, and this will not be until we fairly cast off our thick coats of Matter; until we begin acting from within, instead of ever following impulses from without, impulses produced by our physical senses and gross selfish body. Until then the only palliatives for the evils of life are union and harmony—a Brotherhood in actu, and Altruism not simply in name. The suppression of one single bad cause will suppress not one, but many bad effects. And if a Brotherhood, or even a number of Brotherhoods, may not be able to prevent nations from occasionally cutting each other's throats, still unity in thought and action, and philosophical research into the mysteries of being, will always prevent some persons, who are trying to comprehend that which has hitherto remained to them a riddle, from creating additional causes of mischief in a world already so full of woe and evil. Knowledge of Karma gives the conviction that if
... virtue in distress, and vice in triumph
Make atheists of mankind,[1107]
it is only because mankind has ever shut its eyes to the great truth that man is himself his own saviour and his own destroyer. He need not accuse Heaven and the Gods, Fates and Providence, of the apparent injustice that reigns in the midst of humanity. But let him rather remember and repeat this fragment of Grecian wisdom, which warns man to forbear accusing That which