Till they have become sufficiently pure to enter a higher form of existence.
This means only that Mankind, from the First down to the last, or Seventh Race, is composed of one and the same company of actors, who have descended from higher spheres to perform their artistic tour on this our planet, Earth. Starting as pure spirits on our downward journey around the world (verily!) with the knowledge of truth—now feebly echoed in the Occult Doctrines—inherent in us, cyclic law brings us down to the reversed apex of matter, which is lost down here on earth and the bottom of which we have already struck; and then, the same law of spiritual gravity will make us slowly ascend to still higher, still purer spheres than those we started from.
Foresight, prophecy, oracular powers! Illusive fancies of man's dwarfed perceptions, which see actual images in reflections and shadows, and mistake past actualities for prophetic images of a future that has no room in Eternity. Our macrocosm and its smallest microcosm, man, are both repeating the same play of universal and individual events at each station, as on every stage on which Karma leads them to enact their respective dramas of life. False prophets could have no existence had there been no true prophets. And so there were, and many of both classes, and in all ages. Only, none of these ever saw anything but that which had already come to pass, and had been before prototypically enacted in higher spheres—if the event foretold related to national or public weal or woe—or in some preceding life, if it concerned only an individual, for every such event is stamped as an indelible record of the Past and Future, which are only, after all, the ever Present in Eternity. The “worlds” and the purifications spoken of in the Zohar and other Kabalistic books, relate to our globe and races no more and no less than they relate to other globes and other races that have preceded our own in the great cycle. It was such fundamental truths as these that were performed in allegorical plays and images during the Mysteries, the last Act of which, the Epilogue for the Mystæ, was the anastasis or “continued existence,” as also the “Soul transformation.”
Hence, the author of Neo-platonism and Alchemy shows us that all such Eclectic doctrines were strongly reflected in the Epistles of Paul, and were
Inculcated more or less among the Churches. Hence, such passages as these “Ye were dead in errors and sins; ye walked according to the æon of this world, according to the archon that has the domination of the air.” “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against the dominations, against potencies, against [pg 307]the lords of darkness, and against the mischievousness of spirits in the empyrean regions.” But Paul was evidently hostile to the effort to blend his gospel with the gnostic ideas of the Hebrew-Egyptian school, as seems to have been attempted at Ephesus; and accordingly, wrote to Timothy, his favourite disciple, “Keep safe the precious charge entrusted to thee; and reject the new doctrines and the antagonistic principles of the gnosis, falsely so-called, of which some have made profession and gone astray from the faith.”[557]
But as the Gnosis is the Science pertaining to our Higher Self, as blind faith is a matter of temperament and emotionalism, and as Paul's doctrine was still newer and his interpretations far more thickly veiled, to keep the inner truths hidden far away from the Gnostic, preference has been given to the former by every earnest seeker after truth.
Besides this, the great Teachers who professed the so-called “false Gnosis” were very numerous in the days of the Apostles, and were as great as any converted Rabbi could be. If Porphyry, the Jew Malek, went against Theurgy on account of old traditional recollections, there were other teachers who practised it. Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus were all thaumaturgists, and the latter
Elaborated the entire theosophy and theurgy of his predecessors into a complete system. [558]
As to Ammonius,
Countenanced by Clemens and Athenagoras, in the Church, and by learned men of the Synagogue, the Academy, and the Grove, he fulfilled his labour by teaching a common doctrine for all.[559]