Has not Jesus done the same, since He declared to His disciples that to them it was given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, whereas to the multitudes it was not given, and therefore He spoke in parables which had a two-fold meaning?
Dr. A. Wilder proceeds:
Thus Ammonius found his work ready to his hand. His deep spiritual intuition, his extensive learning, and his familiarity with the Christian fathers, Pantænus, Clement and Athenagoras, and with the most erudite philosophers of the time, all fitted him for the labour he performed so thoroughly.... The results of his ministration are perceptible at the present day in every country of the Christian world; every prominent system of doctrine now bearing the marks of his plastic hand. Every ancient philosophy has had its votaries among the moderns; and even Judaism, oldest of them all, has taken upon itself changes which were suggested by the “God-taught” Alexandrian.[567]
The Neo-Platonic School of Alexandria founded by Ammonius—the prototype proposed for the Theosophical Society—taught Theurgy and Magic, as much as they were taught in the days of Pythagoras, and by others far earlier than his period. For Proclus says that the doctrines of Orpheus, who was an Indian and came from India, were the origin of the systems afterwards promulgated.
What Orpheus delivered in hidden allegories, Pythagoras learned when he was initiated into the Orphic Mysteries; and Plato next received a perfect knowledge of them from Orphic and Pythagorean writings.[568]
The Philaletheians had their division into neophytes (chelas) and Initiates, or Masters; and the eclectic system was characterised by three distinct features, which are purely Vedântic; a Supreme Essence, One and Universal; the eternity and indivisibility of the human spirit; and Theurgy, which is Mantricism. So also, as we have seen, they had their secret or Esoteric teachings like any other mystic school. Nor were they allowed to reveal anything of their secret tenets, any more than were the Initiates of the Mysteries. Only the penalties incurred by the revealers of the secrets of the latter were far more terrible, and this prohibition has survived to this day, not only in India, but even among the Jewish Kabalists in Asia.[569]
One of the reasons for such secrecy may be the undoubtedly serious difficulties and hardships of chelaship, and the dangers attending Initiation. The modern candidate has, like his predecessor of old, to either conquer or die; when, which is still worse, he does not lose his reason. There is no danger to him who is true and sincere, and, especially, unselfish. For he is thus prepared beforehand to meet any temptation.
He, who fully recognised the power of his immortal spirit, and never doubted for one moment its omnipotent protection, had naught to fear. But woe to the candidate in whom the slightest physical fear—sickly child of matter—made him lose sight and faith in his own invulnerability. He who was not wholly confident of his moral fitness to accept the burden of these tremendous secrets was doomed.[570]
There were no such dangers in Neo-Platonic Initiations. The selfish and the unworthy failed in their object, and in the failure was the punishment. The chief aim was “reunion of the part with the all.” This All was One, with numberless names. Whether called Dui, the “bright Lord of Heaven” by the Âryan; Iao, by the Chaldæan and Kabalist; Iabe by the Samaritan; the Tiu or Tuisco by the Northman; Duw by the Briton; Zeus, by the Thracian or Jupiter by the Roman—it was the Being, the Facit, One and Supreme,[571] the unborn and the inexhaustible source of every emanation, the fountain of life and light eternal, a Ray of which every one of us carries in him on this earth. The knowledge of this Mystery had reached the Neo-Platonists from India through Pythagoras, and still later through Apollonius of Tyana and the rules and methods for producing ecstasy had come from the same lore of the divine Vidyâ, the Gnosis. For Âryavarta, the bright focus into which had been poured in the beginning of time the flames [pg 312] of Divine Wisdom, had become the centre from which radiated the “tongues of fire” into every portion of the globe. What was Samâdhi but that
Sublime ecstasy, in which state things divine and the mysteries of Nature are revealed to us,