Section XXV. Eastern and Western Occultism.
In The Theosophist for March, 1886,[415] in an answer to the “Solar Sphinx,” a member of the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society wrote as follows:
We hold and believe that the revival of Occult Knowledge now in progress will some day demonstrate that the Western system represents ranges of perceptions which the Eastern—at least as expounded in the pages of The Theosophist—has yet to attain.[416]
The writer is not the only person labouring under this erroneous impression. Greater Kabalists than he had said the same in the United States. This only proves that the knowledge possessed by Western Occultists of the true Philosophy, and the “ranges of perceptions” and thought of the Eastern doctrines, is very superficial. This assertion will be easily demonstrated by giving a few instances, instituting comparisons between the two interpretations of one and the same doctrine—the Hermetic Universal Doctrine. It is the more needed since, were [pg 223] we to neglect bringing forward such comparisons, our work would be left incomplete.
We may take the late Éliphas Lévi, rightly referred to by another Western Mystic, Mr. Kenneth Mackenzie, as “one of the greatest representatives of modern Occult Philosophy,”[417] as presumably the best and most learned expounder of the Chaldæan Kabalah, and compare his teaching with that of Eastern Occultists. In his unpublished manuscripts and letters, lent to us by a Theosophist, who was for fifteen years his pupil, we had hoped to find that which he was unwilling to publish. What we do find, however, disappoints us greatly. We will take these teachings, then, as containing the essence of Western or Kabalistic Occultism, analyzing and comparing them with the Eastern interpretation as we go on.
Éliphas Lévi teaches correctly, though in language rather too rhapsodically rhetorical to be sufficiently clear to the beginner, that
Eternal life is Motion equilibrated by the alternate manifestations of force.
But why does he not add that this perpetual motion is independent of the manifested Forces at work? He says: