Theosophical Society,
H P Blavatsky
The Mind in Nature
by
HP Blavatsky
First published in Lucifer, September, 1896 p9
Great
is the self-satisfaction of modern science, and unexampled its
achievements.
Pre-christian and mediæval
philosophers may have left a few
landmarks
over unexplored mines: but the discovery of all the gold and priceless
jewels
is due to the patient labours of the modern scholar.
And thus they
declare
that the genuine, real knowledge of the nature of the Kosmos and of man
is
all of recent growth. The luxuriant modern plant has sprung from the dead
weeds
of ancient superstitions.
Such,
however, is not the view of the students of Theosophy. And they say that
it
is not sufficient to speak contemptuously of "the untenable conceptions of
an
uncultivated
past," as Mr. Tyndall and others have done, to hide the
intellectual
quarries out of which the reputations of so many modern
philosophers
and scientists have been hewn. How many of our distinguished
scientists
have derived honour and credit by merely dressing up the ideas of
those
old philosophers, whom they are ever ready to disparage, is left to an
impartial
posterity to say. But conceit and self-opinionatedness
have fastened
like
two hideous cancers on the brains of the average man of learning; and this
is
especially the case with the Orientalists -- Sanskritists, Egyptologists and
Assyriologists.
The
former are guided (or perhaps only pretend to be guided) by
post-Mahâbhâratan commentators; the latter by arbitrarily
interpreted papyri,
collated
with what this or the other Greek writer said, or passed over in
silence,
and by the cuneiform inscriptions on half-destroyed clay tablets copied
by
the Assyrians from "Accado-" Babylonian
records. Too many of them are apt to forget, at every convenient opportunity,
that the numerous changes in language, the allegorical phraseology and evident
secretiveness of old mystic writers, who were generally under the obligation
never to divulge the solemn secrets of the sanctuary, might have sadly misled
both translators and commentators.
Most
of our Orientalists will rather allow their conceit
to run away with their logic and reasoning powers than admit their ignorance,
and they will proudly claim like Professor Sayce1 that they have unriddled the true meaning of the religious symbols of old,
and can interpret esoteric texts far more correctly than could the initiated
hierophants of Chaldæa and
(fn
1) See the Hibbert Lectures for 1887, pages 14-17, on
the origin and growth
of
the religion of the ancient Babylonians, where Prof. A. H. Sayce
says that
though
"many of the sacred texts were so written as to be intelligible only to
the
initiated [italics mine] ... provided with keys and glosses,"
nevertheless,
as
many of the latter, he adds, "are in our hands," they (the Orientalists) have
"a
clue to the interpretation of these documents which even the initiated
priests
did not possess." (p17)
This
"clue" is the modern craze, so dear to Mr. Gladstone, and so stale in
its
monotony
to most, which consists in perceiving in every symbol of the religions
of
old a solar myth, dragged down, whenever opportunity requires, to a sexual or
phallic emblem. Hence the statement that while "Gisdhubar
was but a champion and conqueror of old times," for the Orientalists, who "can penetrate beneath the myths"
he is but a solar hero, who was himself but the transformed descendant of a
humbler God of Fire (loc. cit. p.17).
This
amounts to saying that the ancient hierogrammatists and priests, who were
the
inventors of all the allegories which served as veils to the many truths
taught
at the Initiations, did not possess a clue to the sacred texts composed
or
written by themselves. But this is on a par with that other illusion of some
Sanskritists, who, though they have
never even been in
Sanskrit
accent and pronunciation, as also the meaning of the Vedic allegories,
far
better than the most learned among the greatest Brahmânical
pundits and
Sanskrit scholars of
After
this who can wonder that the jargon and blinds of our mediæval
alchemists
and
Kabalists are also read literally by the modern
student; that the Greek and
even the ideas od
Aeschylus are corrected and improved upon by the
religious practice was only external; and that
those guardians of the primitive
divine
revelation, who had solved every problem that is within the grasp of
human
intellect, were bound together by a universal freemasonry of science and
philosophy,
which formed one unbroken chain around the globe. It is for
philology
and the Orientalists to endeavour
to find the end of the thread. But
if
they will persist in seeking it in one direction only, and that the wrong
one,
truth and fact will never be discovered. It thus remains the duty of
psychology
and Theosophy to help the world to arrive at them.
Study
the Eastern religions by the light of Eastern -- not Western --
philosophy,
and if you happen to relax correctly one single loop of the old
religious
systems, the chain of mystery may be disentangled. But to achieve
this,
one must not agree with those who teach that it is unphilosophical
to
enquire
into first causes, and that all that we can do is to consider their
physical
effects. The field of scientific investigation is bounded by physical
nature
on every side; hence, once the limits of matter are reached, enquiry must
stop
and work be re-commenced. As the Theosophist has no desire to play at being a
squirrel upon its revolving wheel, he must refuse to follow the lead of the
materialists.
He,
at any rate, knows that the revolutions of the physical world are, according
to
the ancient doctrine, attended by like revolutions in the world of intellect,
for
the spiritual evolution in the universe proceeds in cycles, like the
physical
one. Do we not see in history a regular alternation of ebb and flow in
the
tide of human progress? Do we not see in history, and even find this within
our
own experience, that the great kingdoms of the world, after reaching the
culmination
of their greatness, descend again, in accordance with the same law
by
which they ascended? till, having reached the lowest point, humanity
reasserts
itself and mounts up once more, the height of its attainment being, by
this
law of ascending progression by cycles, somewhat higher than the point from
which it had before descended? Kingdoms and empires are under the same cyclic
laws as plants, races and everything else in Kosmos.
The
division of the history of mankind into what the Hindus call the Sattva,
Tretya, Dvâpara and Kali
Yugas, and what the Greeks referred to as "the Golden, Silver, Copper, and
Iron Ages" is not a fiction. We see the same thing in the literature of
peoples. An age of great inspiration and unconscious
productiveness
is invariably followed by an age of criticism and consciousness.
The
one affords material for the analyzing and critical intellect of the other.
"The moment is more opportune than ever
for the review of old philosophies.
Archæologists,
philologists, astronomers, chemists and physicists are getting
nearer and nearer to the point where they
will be forced to consider them.
Physical science has already reached its
limits of exploration; dogmatic
theology sees the springs of its inspiration
dry. The day is approaching when
the world will receive the proofs that only
ancient religions were in harmony
with nature, and ancient science embraced all
that can be known."
Once
more the prophecy already made in Isis Unveiled twenty-two years ago is
reiterated.
"Secrets
long kept may be revealed; books long forgotten and arts long time
lost may be brought out to light again;
papyri and parchments of inestimable
importance will turn up in the hands of men
who pretend to have unrolled them
from mummies, or stumbled upon them in buried
crypts; tablets and pillars,
whose sculptured revelations will stagger
theologians and confound scientists,
may yet be excavated and interpreted. Who
knows the possibilities of the
future? An era of disenchantment and
rebuilding will soon begin -- nay, has
already begun. The cycle has almost run its
course; a new one is about to
begin, and the future pages of history may
contain full evidence, and convey
full proof of the above."
Since
the day that this was written much of it has come to pass, the discovery
of
the Assyrian clay tiles and their records alone having forced the
interpreters
of the cuneiform inscriptions--both Christians and Freethinkers--to
alter
the very age of the world.2
(fn 2) Sargon, the first "Semitic" monarch of
original of Moses, is now placed 3,750 years B.C.
(p21), and the Third Dynasty
of
The
chronology of the Hindu Purânas, reproduced in The Secret Doctrine, is now
derided, but the time may come when it will be universally accepted. This may
be regarded as simply an assumption, but it will be so only for the present.
It
is in truth but a question of time. The whole issue of the quarrel between the
defenders
of ancient wisdom and its detractors -- lay and clerical -- rests (a)
on
incorrect comprehension of the old philosophies, for the lack of the keys the
Assyriologists boast of having
discovered; and (b) on the materialistic and
anthropomorphic
tendencies of the age. This in no wise prevents the Darwinists
and
materialistic philosophers from digging into the intellectual mines of the
ancients
and helping themselves to the wealth of ideas they find in them; nor
the
divines from discovering Christian dogmas in Plato's philosophy and calling
them
"presentiments," as in Dr. Lundy's Monumental Christianity, and other
like
modern
works.
Of
such "presentiments" the whole literature -- or what remains of this
sacerdotal
literature -- of India, Egypt, Chaldæa, Persia,
Greece and even of
Guatemala
(Popul Vuh), is full. Based
on the same foundation-stone -- the
ancient
Mysteries -- the primitive religions, all without one exception, reflect
the
most important of the once universal beliefs, such, for instance, as an
impersonal
and universal divine Principle, absolute in its nature, and
unknowable
to the "brain" intellect, or the conditioned and limited cognition of
man.
To
imagine any witness to it in the manifested universe, other than as Universal
Mind,
the Soul of the universe is impossible. That which alone stands as an
undying
and ceaseless evidence and proof of the existence of that One Principle,
is
the presence of an undeniable design in kosmic
mechanism, the birth, growth,
death
and transformation of everything in the universe, from the silent and
unreachable
stars down to the humble lichen, from man to the invisible lives now
called
microbes. Hence the universal acceptation of "Thought Divine," the
Anima
Mundi of all antiquity.
This
idea of Mahat (the great) Akâshâ
or Brahma's aura of transformation with
the
Hindus, of Alaya, "the divine Soul of thought
and compassion" of the
trans-Himâlayan mystics; of Plato's "perpetually reasoning
Divinity," is the
oldest
of all the doctrines now known to, and believed in, by man. Therefore
they
cannot be said to have originated with Plato, nor with Pythagoras, nor with
any
of the philosophers within the historical period. Say the Chaldæan
Oracles
"The
works of nature co-exist with the intellectual noero,
spiritual Light of
the
Father. For it is the Soul psyche which adorned the great heaven, and which
adorns
it after the Father."
"The
incorporeal world then was already completed, having its seat in the Divine
Reason,"
says Philo, who is erroneously accused of deriving his philosophy from Plato.
In
the Theogony of Mochus, we
find Æther first, and then the air; the two
principles
from which Ulom, the intelligible (noetos) God (the visible universe
of
matter) is born.
In
the Orphic hymns, the Eros-Phanes evolves from the
Spiritual Egg, which the
æthereal winds impregnate, wind being "the
Spirit of God," who is said to move
in
æther, "brooding over the Chaos" -- the
Divine "Idea." In the Hindu
Kathopanishad, Purusha,
the Divine Spirit, stands before the original Matter;
from
their union springs the great Soul of the World, "Mahâ-Âtmâ,
Brahm, the
Spirit
of Life;" these latter appellations are identical with the Universal
Soul,
or Anima Mundi, and the Astral Light of the
Theurgists and Kabalists.
Pythagoras
brought his doctrines from the eastern sanctuaries, and Plato
compiled
them into a form more intelligible than the mysterious numerals of the
Sage
-- whose doctrines he had fully embraced -- to the uninitiated mind. Thus,
the
Kosmos is "the Son" with Plato, having for his father and mother the
Divine
Thought
and Matter. The "Primal Being" (Beings, with the Theosophists, as
they
are
the collective aggregation of the divine Rays), is an emanation of the
Demiurgic
or Universal Mind which contains from eternity the idea of the "to be
created
world" within itself, which idea the unmanifested
Logos produces of
Itself.
The first Idea "born in darkness before the creation of the world"
remains
in the unmanifested Mind; the second is this Idea
going out as a
reflection
from the Mind (now the manifested Logos), becoming clothed with
matter,
and assuming an objective existence.
H
P Blavatsky
Mediums in Ancient Times, Etc., Etc.
Ancient
Magic in Modern Science
Cardiff Blavatsky Archive
Theosophical Society, Cardiff Lodge, 206 Newport Road,
Cardiff CF24 – 1DL
Link to Main
Cardiff Theosophical Society Website
Cardiff
Lodge’s Instant Guide to Theosophy
History
of the Theosophical Society in Wales
Theosophy
and the Number Seven
A selection of
articles relating to the esoteric
significance
of the Number 7 in Theosophy
Dave’s Streetwise
Theosophy Boards
The Theosophy Website that
welcomes Absolute Beginners
The Most Basic
Theosophy Website in the Universe
If you run a
Theosophy Group, you can use
This as an introductory handout
One liners and quick
explanations
About aspects of Theosophy
H P Blavatsky is usually the only
Theosophist that most people have ever
heard of. Let’s put that right
An Independent
Theosophical Republic
Links to Free Online
Theosophy
Study Resources; Courses, Writings,
An entertaining introduction to Theosophy
Blavatsky
Calling and I Don’t Wanna Shout
The Voice of the Silence Website
A selection of articles on
Reincarnation
by Theosophical writers
Provided in response to the
large
number of enquiries we receive
at
__________________________
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
Try these if you are looking for a local group
UK
Listing of Theosophical Groups