ARTICLES
BY H P BLAVATSKY
. . . Commence research
where modern conjecture closes
its faithless wings (Bulwer's Zanoni).
The flat denial of
yesterday has become the scientific axiom of
to-day (Common Sense
Aphorisms).
Thousands of years ago
the Phrygian Dactyls, the initiated priests, spoken of as the "magicians
and exorcists of sickness," healed diseases by magnetic processes. It was
claimed that they had obtained these curative powers from the powerful breath
of Cybele, the many-breasted goddess, the daughter of
Cœlus and Terra. Indeed, her genealogy and the myths
attached to it show Cybele as the personification and
type of the vital essence, whose source was located by the ancients between the
Earth and the starry sky, and who was regarded as the very fons
vitæ of all that lives and breathes. The mountain air
being placed nearer to that fount fortifies health and prolongs man's
existence; hence, Cybele's life, as an infant, is
shown in her myth as having been preserved on a mountain. This was before that
Magna and Bona Dea, the prolific Mater, became
transformed into Ceres-Demeter, the patroness of the Eleusinian Mysteries.
Animal magnetism (now
called Suggestion and Hypnotism) was the principal agent in theurgic
mysteries as also in the Asclepieia – the healing
temples of Æsculapius, where the patients once
admitted were treated, during the process of "incubation,"
magnetically, during their sleep.
This creative and
life-giving Force – denied and laughed at when named theurgic
magic, accused for the last century of being principally based on superstition
and fraud, whenever referred to as mesmerism – is now called Hypnotism, Charcotism, Suggestion, "psychology," and what
not. But, whatever the expression chosen, it will ever be a loose one if used
without a proper qualification. For when epitomized with all its collateral
sciences – which are all sciences within the science – it will be found to
contain possibilities the nature of which has never been even dreamt of by the
oldest and most learned professors of the orthodox physical science. The
latter, "authorities" so-called, are no better, indeed, than innocent
bald infants, when brought face to face with the mysteries of antediluvian
"mesmerism." As stated repeatedly before, the blossoms of magic,
whether white or black, divine or infernal, spring all from one root. The
"breath of Cybele" – Akâsa
tattwa, in India – is the one chief agent, and it
underlay the so-called "miracles" and "supernatural"
phenomena in all ages, as in every clime. As the parent-root or essence is
universal, so are its effects innumerable. Even the greatest adepts can hardly
say where its possibilities must stop.
The key to the very
alphabet of these theurgic powers was lost after the
last gnostic had been hunted to death by the
ferocious persecution of the Church; and as gradually Mysteries, Hierophants, Theophany and Theurgy became
obliterated from the minds of men until they remained in them only as a vague
tradition, all this was finally forgotten. But at the period of the
Renaissance, in Germany, a learned Theosophist, a Philosopher per ignem, as they called themselves, rediscovered some of the
lost secrets of the Phrygian priests and of the Asclepieia.
It was the great and unfortunate physician-Occultist, Paracelsus, the greatest
Alchemist of the age. That genius it was, who during the Middle Ages was the
first to publicly recommend the action of the magnet in the cure of certain
diseases. Theophrastus Paracelsus – the "quack" and "drunken
impostor" in the opinion of the said scientific "bald infants"
of his day, and of their successors in ours – inaugurated among other things in
the seventeenth century, that which has become a profitable branch in trade in
the nineteenth. It is he who invented and used for the cure of various muscular
and nervous diseases magnetized bracelets, armlets, belts, rings, collars and leglets; only his magnets cured far more efficaciously than
do the electric belts of to-day. Van Helmont, the
successor of Paracelsus, and Robert Fludd, the
Alchemist and Rosicrucian, also applied magnets in the treatment of their
patients. Mesmer in the eighteenth, and the Marquis
de Puységur in the nineteenth century only followed
in their footsteps.
In the large curative
establishment founded by Mesmer at Vienna, he
employed, besides magnetism, electricity, metals and a variety of woods. His
fundamental doctrine was that of the Alchemists. He believed that metals, as
also woods and plants have all an affinity with. and bear a close relation to,
the human organism. Everything in the Universe has developed from one
homogeneous primordial substance differentiated into incalculable species of
matter, and everything is destined to return thereinto.
The secret of healing, he maintained, lies in the knowledge of correspondences
and affinities between kindred atoms. Find that metal, wood, stone, or plant
that has the most correspondential affinity with the
body of the sufferer; and, whether through internal or external use, that
particular agent imparting to the patient additional strength to fight disease
– (developed generally through the introduction of some foreign element into
the constitution) – and to expel it, will lead invariably to his cure. Many and
marvellous were such cures effected by Anton Mesmer.
Subjects with heart-disease were made well. A lady of high station, condemned
to death, was completely restored to health by the application of certain
sympathetic woods. Mesmer himself, suffering from
acute rheumatism, cured it completely by using specially-prepared magnets.
In 1774 he too happened
to come across the theurgic secret of direct vital
transmission; and so highly interested was he, that he abandoned all his old
methods to devote himself entirely to the new discovery. Henceforward he mesmerised by gaze and passes, the natural magnets being
abandoned. The mysterious effects of such manipulations were called by him –
animal magnetism. This brought to Mesmer a mass of
followers and disciples. The new force was experimented with in almost every
city and town of Europe and found everywhere an actual fact.
About 1780, Mesmer settled in Paris, and soon the whole metropolis,
from the Royal family down to the last hysterical bourgeoise,
were at his feet. The clergy got frightened and cried – "the Devil"!
The licensed "leeches" felt an ever-growing deficit in their pockets;
and the aristocracy and the Court found themselves on the verge of madness from
mere excitement. No use repeating too well-known facts, but the memory of the
reader may be refreshed with a few details he may have forgotten.
It so happened that just
about that time the official Academical Science felt
very proud. After centuries of mental stagnation in the realm of medicine and
general ignorance, several determined steps in the direction of real knowledge
had finally been made. Natural sciences had achieved a decided success, and
chemistry and physics were on a fair way to progress. As the Savants of a
century ago had not yet grown to that height of sublime modesty which
characterizes so pre-eminently their modern successors – they felt very much
puffed up with their greatness. The moment for praiseworthy humility, followed
by a confession of the relative insignificance of the knowledge of the period –
and even of modern knowledge for the matter of that – compared to that which
the ancients knew, had not yet arrived. Those were days of naive boasting of
the peacocks of science displaying in a body their tails, and demanding
universal recognition and admiration.
The Sir Oracles were not
as numerous as they are now, yet their number was considerable. And indeed, had
not the Dulcamaras of public fairs been just visited
with ostracism? Had not the leeches well nigh disappeared to make room for
diploma-ed physicians with royal licenses to kill and bury a piacere ad libitum? Hence, the
nodding "Immortal" in his academical chair
was regarded as the sole competent authority in the decision of questions he
had never studied, and for rendering verdicts about that which he had never
heard of. It was the REIGN OF REASON, and of Science – in its teens; the
beginning of the great deadly struggle between Theology and Facts, Spirituality
and Materialism.
In the educated classes
of Society too much faith had been succeeded by no faith at all The cycle of
Science-worship had just set in, with its pilgrimages to the Academy, the
Olympus where the "Forty Immortals" are enshrined, and its raids upon
every one who refused to manifest a noisy admiration, a kind of juvenile calf's
enthusiasm, at the door of the Fane of Science. When Mesmer
arrived, Paris divided its allegiance between the Church which attributed all
kinds of phenomena except its own divine miracles to the Devil, and the Academy,
which believed in neither God nor Devil, but only in its own infallible wisdom.
But there were minds
which would not be satisfied with either of these beliefs. Therefore, after Mesmer had forced all Paris to crowd to his halls, waiting
hours to obtain a place in the chair round the miraculous baquet,
some people thought that it was time real truth should be found out. They had
laid their legitimate desires at the royal feet, and the King forthwith
commanded his learned Academy to look into the matter. Then it was, that
awakening from their chronic nap, the "Immortals" appointed a
committee of investigation, among which was Benjamin Franklin, and chose some
of the oldest, wisest and baldest among their "Infants" to watch over
the Committee.
This was in 1784. Every
one knows what was the report of the latter and the final decision of the
Academy. The whole transaction looks now like a general rehearsal of the play,
one of the acts of which was performed by the "Dialectical Society"
of London and some of England's greatest Scientists, some eighty years later.
Indeed, notwithstanding
a counter report by Dr. Jussieu, an Academician of
the highest rank, and the Court physician D'Eslon,
who, as eye-witnesses to the most striking phenomena, demanded that a careful
investigation should be made by the Medical Faculty of the therapeutic effects
of the magnetic fluid – their demand fell through. The Academy disbelieved her
most eminent Scientists. Even Sir B. Franklin, so much at home with cosmic electricity,
would not recognize its fountain head and primordial source, and along with Bailly, Lavoisier, Magendie, and others, proclaimed Mesmerism a delusion. Nor
had the second investigation which followed the first – namely in 1825 – any
better results. The report was once more squashed (vide "Isis
Unveiled," vol. i, pp. 171-176).
Even now when experiment
has amply demonstrated that
"Mesmerism" or
animal magnetism, now known as hypnotism (a sorry effect, forsooth, of the
"Breath of Cybele") is a fact, we yet get
the majority of scientists denying its actual existence. Small fry as it is in
the majestic array of experimental psycho-magnetic phenomena, even hypnotism
seems too incredible, too mysterious, for our Darwinists and Hæckelians. One needs too much moral courage, you see, to
face the suspicion of one's colleagues, the doubt of the public, and the
giggling of fools. "Mystery and charlatanism go hand in hand," they
say; and "self-respect and the dignity of the profession," as Magendie remarks in his Physiologie
Humaine, "demand that the well informed
physician should remember how readily mystery glides into charlatanism."
Pity the "well informed physician" should fail to remember that
physiology among the rest is full of mystery – profound, inexplicable mystery
from A to Z – and ask whether, starting from the above "truism," he
should not throw overboard Biology and Physiology as the greatest pieces of
charlatanry in modern Science. Nevertheless, a few in the well-meaning minority
of our physicians have taken up seriously the investigation of hypnotism. But
even they, having been reluctantly compelled to confess the reality of its
phenomena, still persist in seeing in such manifestations no higher a factor at
work than the purely material and physical forces, and deny these their
legitimate name of animal magnetism. But as the Rev. Mr. Haweis
(of whom more presently) just said in the Daily Graphic . . . "The Charcot phenomena are, for all that, in many ways identical
with the mesmeric phenomena, and hypnotism must properly be considered rather
as a branch of mesmerism than as something distinct from it. Anyhow, Mesmer's facts, now generally accepted, were at first
stoutly denied." And they are still so denied.
But while they deny
Mesmerism, they rush into Hypnotism, despite the now scientifically recognised dangers of this science, in which medical
practitioners in France are far ahead of the English. And what the former say
is, that between the two states of mesmerism (or magnetism as they call it,
across the water) and hypnotism "there is an abyss." That one is
beneficent, the other maleficent, as it evidently must be; since, according to
both Occultism and modern Psychology, hypnotism is produced by the withdrawal
of the nervous fluid from the capillary nerves, which being, so to say, the
sentries that keep the doors of our senses opened, getting anæsthetized
under hypnotic conditions, allow these to get closed. A. H. Simonin
reveals many a wholesome truth in his excellent work, "Solution du problème de la suggestion
hypnotique."1 Thus he shows that while "in Magnetism (mesmerism)
there occurs in the subject a great development of moral faculties"; that
his thoughts and feelings "become loftier, and the senses acquire an
abnormal acuteness"; in hypnotism, on the contrary, "the subject
becomes a simple mirror." It is Suggestion which is the true motor of
every action in the hypnotic: and if, occasionally, "seemingly marvellous
actions are produced, these are due to the hypnotiser,
not to the subject." Again . . . . "In hypnotism instinct, i.e., the
animal, reaches its greatest development; so much so, indeed, that the aphorism
'extremes meet' can never receive a better application than to magnetism and
hypnotism." How true these words, also, as to the difference between the mesmerised and the hypnotised
subjects. "In one, his ideal nature, his moral self – the reflection of
his divine nature – are carried to their extreme limits, and the subject
becomes almost a celestial being (un ange). In the other,
it is his instincts which develop in a most surprising fashion. The hypnotic
lowers himself to the level of the animal. From a physiological standpoint,
magnetism (Mesmerism) is comforting and curative, and hypnotism, which is but
the result of an unbalanced state, is – most dangerous."
Thus the adverse Report
drawn by Bailly at the end of last century has had
dire effects in the present, but it had its Karma also. Intended to kill the
"Mesmeric" craze, it reacted as a death-blow to the public confidence
in scientific decrees. In our day the Non-Possumus of
the Royal Colleges and Academies is quoted on the Stock Exchange of the world's
opinion at a price almost as low as the Non-Possumus
of the Vatican. The days of authority whether human or divine, are fast gliding
away; and we see already gleaming on future horizons but one tribunal, supreme
and final, before which mankind will bow – the Tribunal of Fact and Truth.
Aye, to this tribunal
without appeal even liberal clergymen and famous preachers make obeisance in
our day. The parts have now changed hands, and in many instances it is the
successors of those who fought tooth and nail for the reality of the Devil and
his direct interference with psychic phenomena, for long centuries, who come
out publicly to upbraid science. A remarkable instance of this is found in an
excellent letter (just mentioned) by the Rev. Mr. Haweis
to the Graphic. The learned preacher seems to share our indignation at the
unfairness of the modern scientists, at their suppression of truth, and
ingratitude to their ancient teachers. His letter is so interesting that its
best points must be immortalized in our magazine. Here are some fragments of
it. Thus he asks: –
Why can't our scientific
men say: "We have blundered about Mesmerism; it's practically true"?
Not because they are men of science, but simply because they are human. No
doubt it is humiliating when you have dogmatised in
the name of science to say, "I was wrong." But is it not more
humiliating to be found out; and is it not most humiliating, after shuffling
and wriggling hopelessly in the inexorable meshes of serried facts, to collapse
suddenly, and call the hated net a "suitable enclosure," in which
forsooth, you don't mind being caught? Now this, as it seems to me, is
precisely what Messrs. Charcot and the French
hypnotists and their medical admirers in England are doing. Ever since Mesmer's death at the age of eighty, in 1815, the French
and English "Faculty," with some honorable exceptions, have ridiculed
and denied the facts as well as the theories of Mesmer,
but now, in 1890, a host of scientists suddenly agree, while wiping out as best
they may the name of Mesmer, to rob him of all his
phenomena, which they quietly appropriate under the name of "hypnotism,"
"suggestion," "Therapeutic Magnetism," "psychopathic
Massage," and all the rest of it. Well, "What's in a name?"
I care more for things
than names, but I reverence the pioneers of thought who have been cast out,
trodden under foot, and crucified by the orthodox of all ages, and I think the
least scientists can do for men like Mesmer, Du Potet, Puységur,
or Mayo and Elliotson, now they are gone, is to
"build their sepulchres."
But Mr. Haweis might have added instead, the amateur Hypnotists of
Science dig with their own hands the graves of many a man and woman's
intellect; they enslave and paralyse freewill in
their "subjects," turn immortal men into soulless, irresponsible
automata, and vivisect their souls with as much unconcern as they vivisect the
bodies of rabbits and dogs. In short, they are fast blooming into
"sorcerers," and are turning science into a vast field of black
magic. The rev. writer, however, lets the culprits off easily; and, remarking
that he accepts "the distinction" [between Mesmerism and Hypnotism]
"without pledging himself to any theory," he adds: –
I am mainly concerned
with the facts, and what I want to know is why these cures and abnormal states
are trumpeted about as modern discoveries, while the "faculty" still
deride or ignore their great predecessors without having themselves a theory
which they can agree upon or a single fact which can be called new. The truth
is we are just blundering back with toil to work over again the old disused
mines of the ancients; the rediscovery of these occult sciences is exactly
matched by the slow recovery of sculpture and painting in modern Europe.
Here is the history of
occult science in a nutshell.
(1) Once known.
(2) Lost.
(3) Rediscovered.
(4) Denied.
(5) Reaffirmed, and by
slow degrees, under new names, victorious.
The evidence for all
this is exhaustive and abundant. Here it may suffice to notice that Diodorus Siculus mentions how the
Egyptian priests, ages before Christ, attributed clairvoyance induced for
therapeutic purposes to Isis. Strabo ascribes the
same to Serapis, while Galen mentions a temple near
Memphis famous for these Hypnotic cures. Pythagoras, who won the confidence of
the Egyptian priests, is full of it. Aristophanes in "Plutus"
describes in some detail a Mesmeric cure – "and first he began to handle
the head." Cælius Aurelianus
describes manipulations (1569) for disease "conducting the hands from the
superior to the inferior parts"; and there was an old Latin proverb – Ubi dolor ibi digitus,
"Where pain there finger." But time would fail me to tell of
Paracelsus (1462)2 and his "deep secret of Magnetism"; of Van Helmont (1644)3 and his "faith in the power of the
hand in disease." Much in the writings of both these men was only made
clear to the moderns by the experiments of Mesmer,
and in view of modern Hypnotists it is clearly with him and his disciples that
we have chiefly to do. He claimed, no doubt, to transmit an animal magnetic
fluid, which I believe the Hypnotists deny.
They do, they do. But so
did the scientists with regard to more than one truth. To deny "an animal
magnetic fluid" is surely no more absurd than to deny the circulation of
the blood, as they have so energetically done.
A few additional details
about Mesmerism given by Mr. Haweis may prove
interesting. Thus he reminds us of the answer written by the much wronged Mesmer to the Academicians after their unfavorable Report,
and refers to it as "prophetic words."
"You say that Mesmer will never hold up his head again. If such is the
destiny of the man it is not the destiny of the truth, which is in its nature
imperishable, and will shine forth sooner or later in the same or some other
country with more brilliancy than ever, and its triumph will annihilate its
miserable detractors." Mesmer left Paris in
disgust, and retired to Switzerland to die; but the illustrious Dr. Jussieu became a convert. Lavater
carried Mesmer's system to Germany, while Puységur and Deleuze spread it
throughout provincial France, forming innumerable "harmonic
societies" devoted to the study of therapeutic magnetism and its allied
phenomena of thought-transference, hypnotism, and clairvoyance.
Some twenty years ago I
became acquainted with perhaps the most illustrious disciple of Mesmer, the aged Baron du Potet.4
Round this man's therapeutic and mesmeric exploits raged, between 1830 and
1846, a bitter controversy throughout France.
A murderer had been
tracked, convicted, and executed solely on evidence supplied by one of Du Potet's clairvoyantes.
The Juge de Paix admitted
thus much in open court. This was too much for even sceptical
Paris, and the Academy determined to sit again and, if possible, crush out the
superstition. They sat, but, strange to say, this time they were converted. Itard, Fouquier, Guersent, Bourdois de la Motte, the cream of the French faculty, pronounced the
phenomena of mesmerism to be genuine – cures, trances, clairvoyance,
thought-transference, even reading from closed books; and from that time an
elaborate nomenclature was invented, blotting out as far as possible the
detested names of the indefatigable men who had compelled the scientific
assent, while enrolling the main facts vouched for by Mesmer,
Du Potet, and Puységur among the undoubted phenomena to be accepted, on
whatever theory, by medical science. . . .
Then comes the turn of
this foggy island and its befogged scientists. "Meanwhile," goes on
the writer,
England was more
stubborn. In 1846 the celebrated Dr. Elliot son, a popular practitioner, with a
vast clientele, pronounced the famous Harveian
oration, in which he confessed his belief in Mesmerism. He was denounced by the
doctors with such thorough results that he lost his practice, and died
well-nigh ruined, if not heart-broken. The Mesmeric Hospital in Marylebone Road
has been established by him. Operations were successfully performed under
Mesmerism, and all the phenomena which have lately occurred at Leeds and
elsewhere to the satisfaction of the doctors were produced in Marylebone
fifty-six years ago. Thirty-five years ago Professor Lister did the same – but
the introduction of chloroform being more speedy and certain as an anæsthetic, killed for a time the mesmeric treatment. The
public interest in Mesmerism died down, and the Mesmeric Hospital in the
Marylebone Road, which had been under a cloud since the suppression of Elliotson, was at last closed. Lately we know what has been
the fate of Mesmer and Mesmerism. Mesmer
is spoken of in the same breath with Count Cagliostro,
and Mesmerism itself is seldom mentioned at all; but, then, we hear plenty of
electro-biology, therapeutic magnetism and hypnotism – just so. Oh, shades of Mesmer, Puységur, Du Potet, Elliotson
– sic vos non vobis. Still,
I say Palmam qui meruit ferat. When I knew Baron du Potet he was on the brink of the grave, and nearly eighty
years old. He was an ardent admirer of Mesmer; he had
devoted his whole life to therapeutic magnetism, and he was absolutely dogmatic
on the point that a real magnetic aura passed from the Mesmerist to the
patient. "I will show you this," he said one day, as we both stood by
the bedside of a patient in so deep a trance that we ran needles into her hands
and arms without exciting the least sign or movement. The old Baron continued:
"I will, at the distance of a foot or two, determine slight convulsions in
any part of her body by simply moving my hand above the part, without any
contact." He began at the shoulder, which soon set up a twitching. Quiet
being restored, he tried the elbow, then the wrist, then the knee, the
convulsions increasing in intensity according to the time employed. "Are
you quite satisfied?" I said, "Quite satisfied"; and, continued
he, "any patient that I have tested I will undertake to operate upon
through a brick wall at a time and place where the patient shall be ignorant of
my presence or my purpose. This," added Du Potet, "was one of the experiences which most puzzled
the Academicians at Paris. I repeated the experiment again and again under
every test and condition, with almost invariable success, until the most sceptical was forced to give in."
We have accused science
of gliding full sail down to the Maëlström of Black
Magic, by practising that which ancient Psychology – the most important branch
of the Occult Sciences – has always declared as Sorcery in its application to
the inner man. We are prepared to maintain what we say. We mean to prove it one
of these days, in some future articles, basing ourselves on facts published and
the actions produced by the Hypnotism of Vivisectionists themselves. That they
are unconscious sorcerers does not make away with the fact that they do
practice the Black Art bel et bien.
In short the situation is this. The minority of the learned physicians and
other scientists experiment in "hypnotism" because they have come to
see something in it; while the majority of the members of the R.C.P.'s still deny the actuality of animal magnetism in
its mesmeric form, even under its modern mask – hypnotism. The former –
entirely ignorant of the fundamental laws of animal magnetism – experiment at
hap-hazard, almost blindly. To remain consistent with their declarations (a)
that hypnotism is not mesmerism, and (b) that a magnetic aura or fluid passing
from the mesmeriser (or hypnotiser)
is pure fallacy – they have no right, of course, to apply the laws of the older
to the younger science. Hence they interfere with, and awaken to action the
most dangerous forces of nature, without being aware of it. Instead of healing
diseases – the only use to which animal magnetism under its new name can be
legitimately applied – they often inoculate the subjects with their own
physical as well as mental ills and vices. For this, and the ignorance of their
colleagues of the minority, the disbelieving majority of the Sadducees are
greatly responsible. For, by opposing them, they impede free action, and take
advantage of the Hypocratic oath, to make them
powerless to admit and do much that the believers might and would otherwise do.
But as Dr. A. Teste truly says in his work –
"There are certain unfortunate truths which compromise those who believe
in them, and those especially who are so candid as to avow them publicly."
Thus the reason of hypnotism not being studied on its proper lines is
self-evident.
Years ago it was
remarked: "It is the duty of the Academy and medical authorities to study
Mesmerism (i.e., the occult sciences in its spirit) and to subject it to
trials; finally, to take away the use and practice of it from persons quite
strangers to the art, who abuse this means, and make it an object of lucre and
speculation." He who uttered this great truth was "the voice speaking
in the desert." But those having some experience in occult psychology
would go further. They would say it is incumbent on every scientific body –
nay, on every government – to put an end to public exhibitions of this sort. By
trying the magic effect of the human will on weaker wills, by deriding the
existence of occult forces in Nature – forces whose name is legion – and yet
calling out these, under the pretext that they are no independent forces at
all, not even psychic in their nature, but "connected with known physical
laws" (Binet and Féré),
men in authority are virtually responsible for all the dire effects that are
and will be following their dangerous public experiments. Verily Karma – the
terrible but just Retributive Law – will visit all those who develop the most
awful results in the future, generated at those public exhibitions for the
amusement of the profane. Let them only think of dangers bred, of new forms of
diseases, mental and physical, begotten by such insane handling of psychic
will! This is as bad on the moral plane as the artificial introduction of
animal matter into the human blood, by the infamous Brown Sequard
method, is on the physical. They laugh at the occult sciences and deride
Mesmerism? Yet this century will not have passed away before they have
undeniable proofs that the idea of a crime suggested for experiment's sake is
not removed by a reversed current of the will as easily as it is inspired. They
may learn that if the outward expression of the idea of a misdeed
"suggested" may fade out at the will of the operator, the active living
germ artificially implanted does not disappear with it; that once dropped into
the seat of the human – or, rather, the animal – passions, it may lie dormant
there for years sometimes, to become suddenly awakened by some unforeseen
circumstance into realisation. Crying children
frightened into silence by the suggestion of a monster, a devil standing in the
corner, by a foolish nurse, have been known to become insane twenty or thirty
years later on the same subject. There are mysterious, secret drawers, dark
nooks and hiding-places in the labyrinth of our memory, still unknown to
physiologists, and which open only once, rarely twice, in man's lifetime, and
that only under very abnormal and peculiar conditions. But when they do, it is
always some heroic deed committed by a person the least calculated for it, or –
a terrible crime perpetrated, the reason for which remains for ever a mystery.
. . .
Thus experiments in
"suggestion" by persons ignorant of the occult laws, are the most
dangerous of pastimes. The action and reaction of ideas on the inner lower
"Ego," has never been studied so far, because that Ego itself is
terra incognita (even when not denied) to the men of science. Moreover, such
performances before a promiscuous public are a danger in themselves. Men of
undeniable scientific education who experiment on Hypnotism in public, lend
thereby the sanction of their names to such performances. And then every
unworthy speculator acute enough to understand the process may, by developing
by practice and perseverance the same force in himself, apply it to his own
selfish, often criminal, ends. Result on Karmic lines: every Hypnotist, every
man of Science, however well-meaning and honorable, once he has allowed himself
to become the unconscious instructor of one who learns but to abuse the sacred
science, becomes, of course, morally the confederate of every crime committed
by this means.
Such is the consequence of public "Hypnotic" experiments which thus
lead to, and virtually are, BLACK MAGIC.
Lucifer, June, 1890
H. P. Blavatsky
1 See the review of his work in the Journal du Magnetisme, Mai, Juin, 1890, founded in 1845 by Baron du
Potet, and now edited by H. Durville,
in Paris.
2 This date is an error.
Paracelsus was born at Zurich in 1493.
3 This is the date of
Van Helmont's death; he was born in 1577.
4 Baron du Potet was for years Honorary
member of the Theosophical Society. Autograph letters were received from him
and preserved at Adyar, our Headquarters, in which he deplores the flippant
unscientific way in which Mesmerism (then on the eve of becoming the
"hypnotism" of science) was handled "par les charlatans du jour." Had he lived to see the secret science in
its full travesty as hypnotism, his powerful voice might have stopped its
terrible present abuses and degradation into a commercial Punch and Judy show.
Luckily for him, and unluckily for truth, the greatest adept of Mesmerism in
Europe of this century – is dead.
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Theosophy
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The main criteria for the
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Topics include Quantum Theory
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An entertaining introduction to Theosophy
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It’s all “water under the
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Space-Time Continuum.
A selection of articles on
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Blavatsky Wales Theosophy Group
The
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The Earth Base for Evolutionary Theosophy
The Birmingham Annie Besant Lodge
_______________________
Tekels Park
to be Sold to a Developer
Concerns about the fate of the wildlife as
Tekels Park is to be Sold to a Developer
Concerns are raised about the fate of the wildlife as
The Spiritual Retreat, Tekels Park in Camberley,
Surrey, England is to be sold to a developer.
Tekels Park is a 50 acre woodland park, purchased
for the Adyar
Theosophical Society in England in 1929.
In addition to concern about the park, many are
worried about
the future of the Tekels Park Deer
as they are not a protected species.
Anyone planning a “Spiritual” stay at the
Tekels Park Guest House should be aware of the sale.
Tekels Park & the Loch Ness Monster
A Satirical view of the sale
of Tekels Park
in Camberley, Surrey to a
developer
The Toff’s Guide to the Sale of
Tekels Park
What the men in top hats have
to
say about the sale of Tekels
Park
____________________
The Theosophy Cardiff
Glastonbury Pages
The Theosophy
Cardiff Guide to
The Theosophy Cardiff
Guide to
The
Theosophy Cardiff Guide to
The Terraced Maze of Glastonbury Tor
Glastonbury and Joseph of Arimathea
The
Grave of King Arthur & Guinevere
Views
of Glastonbury High Street
The
Theosophy Cardiff Guide to
_____________________
A B C D EFG H IJ KL M N OP QR S T UV WXYZ
Complete
Theosophical Glossary in Plain Text Format
1.22MB
___________________________
Classic Introductory
Theosophy Text
A Text Book of Theosophy By
C
What Theosophy Is From the Absolute to Man
The Formation of a Solar System The Evolution of Life
The Constitution of Man After Death Reincarnation
The Purpose of Life The Planetary Chains
The Result of Theosophical Study
_____________________
Preface to the American Edition Introduction
Occultism and its Adepts The Theosophical Society
First Occult Experiences Teachings of Occult Philosophy
Later Occult Phenomena Appendix
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