“The real man, or the microcosm—and one can say as much of the macrocosm—is an astral force which reveals itself through this physical appearance, and which, having existed before the birth of this form, does not share its fate at the hour of death: surviving its destruction. The material form cannot subsist without[without] the spiritual force which sustains it; but the latter is independent of the former, for form is created by spirit, and not spirit by form.”
This theory is word for word that of the “Brothers” and the Adepts, at the same time it is that of the Kabbalists and the Christians of the School of Origen, and the Johannine Church.
There could not be a more perfect agreement. Transfer this teaching to the genesis of the Kosmos and you have the secret of the formation of the World; at the same time you discover the profound meaning of the saying of St. Paul: “The invisible things of God are made visible to the eye of man through the visible things of the creation,” a saying so well translated by Joseph de Maistre by the following: “The world is a vast system of invisible things, visibly organised.”
The whole of the Kosmos is like a two-faced medal of which both faces are alike. The materialists know only the lower side, while the occultists see it from both sides at once; from the front and from the back. It is always nature, and the same nature, but natura naturata from below, natura naturans from above; here, intelligent cause; there, brute effect; spiritual above, corporeal below, etherealised at the North, concreted at the South Pole.
The distinction accepted everywhere in the West down to our own day, as essential and radical, between spirit on the one hand and matter on the other, is no longer sustainable. The progress of science, spurred on as it will be by Hindu ideas, will soon force the last followers of this infantile belief to abandon it as ridiculous....
Yes, all, absolutely all in the world is life, but life differently organised and variously manifested through phenomena which vary infinitely from the most spiritualised beings, such as the Angels, as well known to Buddhists as to Christians, though called by other names, down to the most solidified of beings, such as stones and metals. In the bosom of the latter, sleep, in a cataleptic condition, milliards of vital elementary spirits. These latter only await, to thrill into activity, the stroke of the pick or hammer to which they will owe their deliverance and their escape from the limbus, of which the Hindu doctrine speaks as well as the Catholic. Here lies, for these souls of life, the starting point of the Resurrection and of the Ascension, taught equally by both the Eastern and the Western traditions, but not understood among us.
[The Abbé sketches in eloquent words the development of these “spirits of the elements,” and then continues:—Tr.]
But as they ascend, so the spirits can also descend, for they are always free to transfigure themselves in the divine light, or to bury themselves in the satanic shadow of error and evil. Hence, while time is time, “these ceaseless tears and gnashings of teeth” of which the gospel Parables speak metaphorically, and which will last as long as shall last the elaboration of the social atoms destined for the collective composition of the beatific Nirvana.
Nature is ever placing under our eyes examples of organic transformations, analagous to those I am speaking of, as if to aid us in comprehending our own destiny. But it seems that many men “have eyes in order not to see,” as Jesus said. See how in order to remove these cataracts, science, even in the West, constantly approaching more and more that of the East, is at work producing in its turn phenomena, which corroborate at once the Parables of the Gospels and the teachings of nature. I will not speak of the Salpêtrière and the marvels of hypnotism in the hands of M. Charcot and his numerous disciples throughout the whole world. There are things which strike me even more.
M. Pictet, at Geneva, is creating diamonds with air and light. This should not astonish those who know that our coal mines are nothing but “stored-up sunlight.” With an even more marvellous industry, do not the flowers extract from the atmosphere the luminous substance of which they weave their fine and joyous garments? And “all that is sown in the earth under a material form, does it not rise under a spiritual form,” as St. Paul says?