Echoes From The Orient: A Broad Outline of Theosophical Doctrines

by William Quan Judge

This is the "wheel of rebirth," from which no man can escape unless he conforms to true ethics and acquires true knowledge and consciousness while living in a body. It was to stop this ceaselessly revolving wheel that Buddha declared his perfect law, and it is the aim of the true Theosophist to turn his great and brilliant "Wheel of the Law" for the healing of the nations.

XXI.

High in the esteem of the Hindû stands the serpent, both as a symbol and a creature. Moving in a wavy line, he figures the vast revolution of the Sun through eternal space carrying the rapidly whirling Earth in her lesser orbit; periodically casting his skin, he presents a visible illustration of renewal of life or reïncarnation; coiling to strike, he shows the working of the law of Karma-Nemesis which, with a basis in our actions, deals an unerring blow. As a symbol with tail in mouth, forming a circle, he represents eternity, the circle of necessity, all-devouring Time. For the older Initiates he spoke to them also of the astral light which is at once devilish and divine.

Probably in the whole field of Theosophic study there is nothing so interesting as the astral light. Among the Hindûs it is known as Akâsa, which can also be translated as æther. Through a knowledge of its properties they say that all the wonderful phenomena of the Oriental Yogis are accomplished. It is also claimed that clairvoyance, clairaudience, mediumship, and seership as known to the Western world are possible only through its means. It is the register of our deeds and thoughts, the great picture gallery of the earth, where the seer can always gaze upon any event that has ever happened, as well as those to come. Swimming in it as in a sea are beings of various orders and also the astral remains of deceased men and women. The Rosicrucians and other European mystics called these beings Sylphs, Salamanders, Gnomes, Undines, Elementals; the Hindû calls them Gandharbhas or celestial musicians, Yakshas, Rakshâsas and many more. The "spooks" of the dead—mistaken by Spiritualists for the individuals who are no more—float in this Akâsic substance, and for centuries have been known to the mystical Hindû as Bhûta, another name for devil, or Pisâcha, a most horrible devil; neither of them any more than the cast-off soul-body nearest earth, devoid of conscience and only powerful for evil.

But the term "astral light," while not new, is purely of Occidental origin. Porphyry spoke of it when referring to the celestial or soul-body, which he says is immortal, luminous, and "star-like;" Paracelsus called it the "sidereal light;" later it grew to be known as astral. It was said to be the same as the anima mundi or soul of the world. Modern scientific investigators approach it when they speak of "luminiferous ether" and "radiant matter." The great astronomer, Camille Flammarion, who was a member of the Theosophical Society during his life, speaks of the astral light in his novel Uranie and says: "The light emanating from all these suns that people immensity, the light reflected through space by all these worlds lighted by these suns, photographs throughout the boundless heaven the centuries, the days, the moments as they pass.... From this it results that the histories of all the worlds are travelling through space without dispersing altogether, and that all the events of the past are present and live evermore in the bosom of the infinite."

Like all unfamiliar or occult things the astral light is difficult to define, and especially so from the very fact that it is called "light." It is not the light as we know it, and neither is it darkness. Perhaps it was said to be a light because when clairvoyants saw by means of it, the distant objects seemed to be illuminated. But as equally well distant sounds can be heard in it, heavy bodies levitated by it, odors carried thousands of miles through it, thoughts read in it, and all the various phenomena by mediums brought about under its action, there has been a use of the term "light" which while unavoidable is none the less erroneous.

A definition to be accurate must include all the functions and powers of this light, but as those are not fully known even to the mystic, and wholly terra incognita for the scientist, we must be content with a partial analysis. It is a substance easily imagined as imponderable ether which, emanating from the stars, envelopes the earth and permeates every atom of the globe and each molecule upon it. Obeying the laws of attraction and repulsion, it vibrates to and fro, making itself now positive and now negative. This gives it a circular motion which is symbolized by the serpent. It is the great final agent, or prime mover, cosmically speaking, which not only makes the plant grow but also keeps up the diastole and systole of the human heart.

Very like the action of the sensitive photographic plate is this light. It takes, as Flammarion says, the pictures of every moment and holds them in its grasp. For this reason the Egyptians knew it as the Recorder; it is the Recording Angel of the Christian, and in one aspect it is Yâma, the judge of the dead in the Hindû pantheon, for it is by the pictures we impress therein that we are judged by Karma.

As an enormous screen or reflector the astral light hangs over the earth and becomes a powerful universal hypnotizer of human beings. The pictures of all acts good and bad done by our ancestors as by ourselves, being ever present to our inner selves, we constantly are impressed by them by way of suggestion and go then and do likewise. Upon this the great French priest-mystic, Éliphas Lévi, says: "We are often astonished when in society at being assailed by evil thoughts and suggestions that we would not have imagined possible, and we are not aware that we owe them solely to the presence of some morbid neighbor; this fact is of great importance, since it relates to the manifestation of conscience—one of the most terrible and incontestable secrets of the magic art.... So diseased souls have a bad breath, and vitiate the moral atmosphere; that is to say, they mingle impure reflections with the astral light which penetrates them, and thus establish deleterious currents."