Cosmic symbolism

by Sepharial

Before one can enter intelligently into an understanding of Cosmic Symbolism, which underlies all occult science, it is necessary that he should have some well-defined conception of the meaning and purpose of Occultism. Otherwise he will occupy the position of one who moves in the dark, a slave to formularies and dogmas, following blindly where others lead and without any definite idea as to his destination.

Misconceptions regarding Occultism are very prevalent and are found to affect the thought of many who in their own walks are exceedingly learned. Occultism is a broad and comprehensive system of thought; a synthetic philosophy aiming at self-realization, and as much concerned in the practical development of the psychical and spiritual powers latent in man as in the study of those wider cosmical laws which hitherto have escaped scientific observation, but which are found to afford a ready explanation of man’s embodied existence, and the wide and varied range of his faculties, aptitudes and individual characteristics.

If Occultism were merely a speculative system of thought regarding the hidden things of Nature, it could never find practical demonstration. If the occult were merely the “hidden,” then Röntgen rays, wireless telegraphy and metabolism would have been facts of Occultism at quite a recent date. In the first case it is confidently affirmed that Occultism, so far from being speculative, is capable of instant demonstration; and in the second case it anticipated the discoveries of Science by analogous psychical processes involved in the exercise of clairvoyance, psychometry, telepathy and hypnotism. Occultism is not indeed mainly concerned in the domain of physics, but rather in those immaterial forces which are at the back of all material forms, of those universal laws which find their reflection in the constitution and development of man and the cosmos to which he is immediately related.

Thus while it seeks to demonstrate some unexplored facts in Nature, it also offers a coherent system of thought in which those facts find appropriate places, and so in effect it affords an ethical basis for all action which is more comprehensive than any system which is the outcome of an insular sociology or a national religion. Its peculiar value as a body of teaching lies in its inclusiveness and catholicity, its freedom from dogma, and its wide suggestiveness. While offering a definite system of cosmogenesis and anthropogenesis, it seeks only to throw new light on old truths, being entirely constructive and in no sense controversial. Unlike orthodox Science and Religion, however, Occultism does not ignore the facts of man’s psychic and spiritual experience. Rather it makes use of these as links which bring us into relations with that greater world and that higher life which for Science has no interest and for Religion no certain meaning. Thus when Science repudiated the Chaldean account of the Genesis, Religion was left with no ground upon which it could convict Science of error! The Occultist remains wholly unaffected by the incident, not because he is either unscientific or irreligious, but because the Book of Genesis is for him as true to-day as when it was written. It is the work of Occultists, and only Occultists can rightly apprehend it.

In the biblical cosmogenesis we are not concerned with ordinary divisions of time called “day” and “night,” periods of twelve hours each, more or less, but with vast periods known as pralayas and manvantaras, or periods of manifestation and obscuration, taking place alternately. These great periods answer to the systole and diastole motion of the Great Breath, the out-breathing and in-breathing of the Cosmic Life-force. In each of these great out-breathings the seven stages of evolution are realized: the Igneous, Gaseous, Fluidic, Mineral, Vegetable, Animal and Human. But those monads that have reached any one of these stages do not become involved in the scheme until that stage is reached to which they attained in the last period of cosmic activity; but from that stage they resume their evolution.

Now as we have every reason to presume that our present period of activity is not the first of our solar system, we have reason to place a special meaning on the words Berâsit brâ Elohim âth hashemâyim veâth heâretz: In the beginning the Elohim compounded the original matter of the heavens and of the earth. Long periods of cosmic evolution elapsed, and at the point where the Great Breath again reached our planet we take up the thread of the Chaldean account veheâretz tohu vebohu: “and the earth was chaotic and barren.” The use of the prefix vau as a copulative conjunction at the beginning of each separate statement, links up the various stages of the evolutional scheme without defining the vast ages, the “days” and “nights” of the cosmos, which intervene. From the great aqueous development we pass to the amphibians, the “creeping things,” the avians or “flying things and fowls of the air,” until by a process of natural evolution and natural selection, determined entirely by the individual power of adaptation to environment, we at length arrive at the evolution of the human-animal. The brief but perfectly scientific statement, “And God (the Elohim) made men out of the dust of the earth,” is a process which involves an indefinitely long period of evolution.

But so far we have only the ascending arc of physical evolution, which in effect found its apotheosis in the production of giant human forms, fitted to the great struggle for existence with the saurians and pachyderms and all that mammoth life, both vegetable and animal, by which it was environed. “There were giants in the earth in those days.” Nature had done her utmost in the production of colossal forms of animal life, she had expended all her strength.

It was at this point, where Nature unaided would have failed, and in process of time died down to her root, as a tree that has put forth leaf and flower and fruit, that the upward arc of physical evolution was met by a downward arc of spiritual involution. The two processes are well defined: 1. God made man out of the dust of the earth. 2. And breathed into his nostrils the breath of lives.

In effect, from this union of spirit and matter we get the genesis of the psyche or soul: “and man became a living soul.” The process of becoming is one that was neither immediate nor complete. Most of us are still in the process of becoming. But a certain number of advanced monads became living souls, realizing their spiritual consciousness while in the flesh. These were the “sons of the gods” referred to in the text. All else were the sons of men. “And the sons of God looked upon the daughters of men and saw that they were fair.” The self-conscious souls took to wife the daughters of a less-evolved race, a process that would seem to be necessary to the further uplifting and spiritual vitalizing of the inferior grades of human life. During the present manvantara or period of cosmic activity we have traditional occult knowledge of four great races of humanity before our own, each of which attained to a successively higher state of civilization, the Atlantean transcending the Lemurian, as in process of time the Aryan will transcend the Atlantean. And as each period of cosmic activity has afforded means of successively higher human development, it is a question as to what has become of those very high forms of spiritualized humanity who were the final product of the material and spiritual evolution of past manvantaras. Earth-born in their origin, and linked to this Earth’s humanity by a thousand compatriot ties, by bonds of blood and heritage, by lives of tireless service, they wait the time when humanity shall have evolved to that stage when personal intercourse is compatible with their own spiritual status and the needs of our further evolution. To them, as pioneers, guardians or masters of the race, we are indebted for the universal tradition which here and there is gathered up by Occultists the world over, and which is realized in its integrity only by those who have fought their way to that place in the scale of spiritual evolution where detachment is possible. To them is attributable the founding of the great world religions, and at the outset these “Sons of God” were the spiritual instructors of the world. Each race produces its own crop of masters, evolved initiates sworn to the service of man for ever. As there is a natural selection, so there is a spiritual selection, and from the moment a human form is invested with a soul (psyche) that soul continues to progress. There is an evolution that has come along the natural line to the production of human lives of great faculty and attainment; and there is an evolution that has followed the spiritual line. Not all evolved humans are invested with the breath of lives. Thus a man may be an intellectual giant and yet not be ensouled, for the psyche is one thing and the pneuma is another. The psyche, or nephesh is common to man and the lower animals and is capable of immense development when investing the human form, but unless this nephesh is illuminated by the ruach or pneuma it cannot advance beyond a certain stage in the present cycle of evolution. Hence the saying, “Work while the day is yet with you, for the night cometh when no man shall work.”

Specialized humanity is a composite of spirit, mind, soul and body. The element or principle in man which distinguishes him from the animal (whether human in form or otherwise), is the Mind. Only in this possession is he truly man. The word man comes, indeed, from the root man (Sansk.), to think. The limitations set up by embodiment of this thinking self is the primary cause of self-realization. All forms of life are conscious, but only spiritualized humanity is self-conscious, or individualized.