[129] This occurs at the beginning of prayers, etc., as our word AMeN occurs at the end. It is so sacred that none must hear it pronounced. Originally its three letters typified the three Vedas, afterwards it became a mystical symbol of Brahma, Vishnu and Siva in unity; see further as to AUM supra.
[130] I. e., the present age of spiritual blindness.
[131] See “Transactions of the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society,” No. 5.
[132] See charge and answer, in Theosophist, August, 1882.
[133] The cycle of existence during the manvantara—period before and after the beginning and completion of which every such “monad” is absorbed and reabsorbed in the ONE soul, anima mundi.
[134] Hades has surely never been meant for Hell. It was always the abode of the sorrowing shadows of astral bodies of the dead personalities. Western readers should remember Kama-loka is not Karma-loka, for Kama means desire, and Karma does not.
[135] Had this word “immediate” been put at the time of publishing Isis between the two words “no” and “reincarnation” there would have been less room for dispute and controversy.
[136] By “sphere above,” of course “Devachan” was meant.
[137] The reader must bear in mind that the esoteric teaching maintains that save in cases of wickedness when man’s nature attains the acme of Evil, and human terrestrial sin reaches Satanic universal character, so to say as some Sorcerers do—there is no punishment for the majority of mankind after death. The law of retribution as Karma, waits man at the threshold of his new incarnation. Man is at best a wretched tool of evil, unceasingly forming new causes and circumstances. He is not always (if ever) responsible. Hence a period of rest and bliss in Devachan, with an utter temporary oblivion of all the miseries and sorrows of life. Avitchi is a spiritual state of the greatest misery and is only in store for those who have devoted consciously their lives to doing injury to others and have thus reached its highest spirituality of Evil.
[138] Says Apuleius: “The soul is born in this world upon leaving the soul of the world (anima mundi) in which her existence precedes the one we all know (on earth). Thus, the Gods who consider her proceedings in all the phases of various existences and as a whole, punish her sometimes for sins committed during an anterior life. She dies when she separates herself from a body in which she crossed this life as in a frail bark. And this is, if I mistake not, the secret meaning of the tumulary inscription, so simple for the initiate: ”To the Gods manes who lived.“ But this kind of death does not annihilate the soul, it only transforms (one portion of it) it into a lemure. ”Lemures“ are the manes, or ghosts, which we know under the name tares. When they keep away and show us a beneficent protection, we honour in them the protecting divinities of the family hearth; but if their crimes sentence them to err, we call them larvæ. They become a plague for the wicked, and the vain terror of the good.” (“Du Dieu de Socrate” Apul. class, pp., 143-145.)