Theosophical University Press Online Edition
Our civilization is at present a civilization in transition. Things are changing, and changing so rapidly that what one evening considers to be settled, the following morning finds undone. People today are beginning to ask themselves questions which it never occurred to them to ask a generation agone; and these questions are of many kinds, but especially those pertaining to religious, philosophical, and scientific matters. The more philosophical minds among men are beginning seriously to question: What is civilization, after all? Is it a steady advance in merely mechanical knowledge? Is the civilized polity of the world the result merely of a period of discovery of natural physical facts, made utilizable for man's benefit or for his destruction, and indeed, mostly for his destruction? Or is civilization the manifestation of the powers of the spirit and of the soul of men? By all past standards and by the defects that observing minds are but too conscious of today, the answer would seem to be: the latter, surely; for a civilization without spiritual and morally intellectual bases becomes but a fabric of barely legal conventions, based upon self-interest and mutual fear.
Civilization is not a mere knowledge of, nor a cultus of, mechanical laws and their useful derivatives; civilization is fundamentally the work of men's hearts; it is also the work of men's intellects; it comprises the work of men's aspirations. No civilization can rest permanently upon soulless machines, although these latter have their proper place. Indeed, machines themselves would never be produced unless there were a more or less stabilized civilization based on ethical law, in which machines as such could be made useful appurtenances of man's profit and comfort. No sane man condemns machines as such; but when the prince is in the palace, and employs the machines around him for the uses to which they are proper, which of the twain is the more important, the man or the machine?
Disraeli, the English statesman and Jewish philosopher, himself a Victorian, as the English say, of the Victorian age of which he writes in clever and graphic phraseology, said many years ago:
The Victorians talk of progress because by the aid of a few mechanical inventions they have succeeded in establishing a society which mistakes comfort for civilization.
"A civilization," says Oswald Spengler, "is the transitory flowering of spiritual forces." So say we. Transitory, because by the laws of cycles, or repetitive action inherent in Nature, things come, have their day, decay, and die, in order to come again in the course of cycling ages. The seasons come and go; the stars and planets follow their cyclical ways; night follows day; decay follows growth; and so forth. For millions of years civilizations have existed in the past; they were the result of the continuously repetitive action of natural forces, a fact upon which Nietzsche based most of his philosophical work, and which one may truly believe to be the best part of all his otherwise more or less erratic writings, to wit: that Nature moves in cycles and thus repeats herself, and that things, civilizations included of course, go and come again and again: have their life and pass, and return. All Nature follows the same general course of cyclical or repetitive action; and similarly so do men, for they are born and die and come again.
It is the teaching of the Esoteric Tradition that on other planets, even of our own solar system, there are great and sometimes grand civilizations -- as they would appear to us men -- wrought and builded up by the inhabitants of these planets, some of which are far higher than our own, and which are such as our planet will be more or less like aeons upon aeons hence, when we shall have evolved to the greater spiritual and intellectual stature that we shall attain in ages to come; and there are other planets far inferior in quality and evolutionary unfoldment to that which our own globe Earth has thus far attained.
Spengler further remarks:
Cinema, Expressionism, Theosophy, boxing-contests, nigger dances, poker, and racing -- one can find it all in Rome. Indeed, the connoisseur might extend his researches to the Indian, Chinese, and Arabian world-cities as well. (149)
True; one can find most of these things, perhaps all of them, issuing forth, flowing forth, from human hearts and minds in any period of brilliant civilization, largely because the same egos -- or aggregated groups of them, reimbody themselves more or less contemporaneously, and thus make a civilization anew which is very largely akin to the civilization which they made in past ages.
That Spengler thus quaintly classifies Theosophy among such things as the cinema, expressionism, nigger-dances, and what not, only shows that this brilliant German writer knows nothing whatever of genuine Theosophy, and doubtless imagines that it is some new-fangled modern religious cult, although no objection can be taken to its mere insertion in a list or category, except on the ground of incompleteness, because to be complete one would have to include in such an hypothetical list Christianity and all its works, modern civilization and all of its strivings, and everything else -- Spengler included.
Well might we say that the past also knew of such men as Oswald Spengler. He also has lived in the past, and others like him, such as the historians and satirists and skeptics and materialists of the different ages, like Juvenal in Rome, and Pyrrho in Greece, and Charvaka in ancient India, and many others.
It is the course of everything, human nature included, after birth, or first appearance, to grow and to attain maturity and to wax strong; then decline sets in, old age follows, then the degeneration of senescence and decay, and finally death ensues. This cycle of change and repetitive phase occurs with and in civilizations as noticeably as it does with man's physical body. Yet while the sun is setting on one part of the earth, it is rising elsewhere. In times of decay, of spiritual loss to the organism, men hunt for truth perhaps more fervidly than in the hot morning of aggressive youth; but they know not, as a rule, whither to turn in order to find it; nor do they know how to take and use the gems of wisdom from the treasuries that their forefathers have bequeathed to them. They have, in such periods, lost the path, as it were; and the consequence is that they search everywhere, in good ways and in evil. Such was the situation during the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, to point to a well-known historical episode by way of illustration; and such to a certain extent is likewise the case with our own civilization today.
The Roman historians of the centuries following the accepted date of the opening of the Christian Era tell us, as for instance Ammianus Marcellinus in the fifth century, that religion and philosophy were so degenerate then, and scientific inquiry and discovery had so nearly ceased -- and Ammianus was a thoughtful and learned inquirer -- that the ordinary run of men of that degenerate period sought for truth and guidance in life by running to consult fortune-tellers often of dubious reputation, and real or pretended astrologers -- astrologers in this period of Roman civilization being the so-called 'Chaldaeans' and 'Babylonians.' These inquirers were hunting for truth and for guidance in life, and for other things much less commendable than this noble objective; and knowing not whither to turn for certain help, they did as experience and history show people will always do when they are at an utter loss and have come to an unknown turning in the road: they ran to speculation and games of chance -- to the many forms of divination, for instance. The old and in many ways highly ethical and majestic state-religion of their forefathers was nearly extinct, while the new religion of twin-birth in Alexandria and Judaea was steadily spreading its power and influence over the Roman Empire. It was to be many long centuries yet before the then future rays of the rising-sun of knowledge were to shine anew over those highly civilized lands bordering the European Inland Sea; in fact, European history shows us that those rays began to illuminate European intellects only about the fourteenth century, some little time before Christopher Columbus, according to the accepted tale, rediscovered the New World lying to the setting sun, far across the Atlantic Ocean in the West.
But what does Ammianus Marcellinus, for instance, tell us of the methods pursued by the people of his own time in their search for spiritual and mental anchorage and guidance? They hunted for truths and direction in goblets filled with water: they divined by means of a ring attached to a string, and held over the top of a goblet, and if, due to a quivering or shaking of the holding hand, the ring touched the rim of the vessel, thus making a sound, they drew weighty conclusions from certain rules of alleged interpretation. The choice of a husband or of a wife was often thus determined; or investments were made or not made thereby; or this or that or some other course in life was followed or abandoned. Palmistry was another eminently popular method of divining truth and the future; or astrologers were consulted.
It will be remembered that the Roman State, and in later times the Roman Emperors, frequently passed laws or issued imperial rescripts directed against the practice of the then prevailing method of astrological divination, the practitioners of it being at repeated intervals expelled from Roman territory, and the degenerate art itself forbidden under the sanctions of law, and the law-breakers made subject to serious penalties. All this official supervision and interference took place, not because the great majority of even highly educated men thus doubted the reality of a genuine Science of Astrology, a fact which the Esoteric Tradition also avers; but because great Seers or Sages no longer moved publicly among the people and taught it publicly, and the true Science had degenerated into a merely pseudo-art practised as a means of gaining influence and position, or as an easy method of obtaining a livelihood. It is indeed small wonder that the Roman State took stringent measures of precaution and often of repression, because frequently unhappy and sometimes fatal consequences ensued, and the running after the will-o'-the-wisps of fortune was seen to be to the detriment of public morals and individual welfare and happiness. People lost their fortunes from following astrological advices; some committed suicide, or even murder, or other crimes; others went mad; some joined political secret societies banded together against the general policy of the Empire or against powerful political influences -- and the Romans, while exceedingly tolerant in all matters of religion as such, or social affairs as such, were always very jealous of secret political organizations, against which they invariably proceeded with relentless energy and with all the instruments of repression that the Roman laws put into their hands. (150)
Much as it was in Ammianus' day, so is it with us today -- though very probably in no such advanced degree. The old religion, popular and all powerful in European countries for some fifteen hundred years past, and similarly in countries settled by European colonists, is now going by the board, at least so far as its dominant and in some cases powerful steadying influence is concerned; and multitudes of good and earnest men and women in the Christian churches are attempting to rescue what remains that is of permanent good and of intrinsic value. People are hunting today, even as they did in the time of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, for spiritual guidance, for intellectual truth, and for mental and spiritual peace; and also today one notices everywhere, just as in the days of the degenerate Roman Imperium, advertisements of fortune-tellers and of diviners and of astrologers so called, and what not.
Methods of divination have always had an appeal for the mass of people in times of trouble and when nobler resources failed them. Such huntings for a resolving of doubts or difficulties have always existed in all times and in all places; and exist today among us, too. Perhaps the Hebraeo-Christian Bible is consulted at such times, or it may be divination by means of opening a book of poems, or possibly of prose, or even a newspaper, or by what is modernly called the methods of 'numerology.' The book or paper is taken, the eyes are shut for a moment, the finger placed at seeming random on some part of the consulted print or writing; and the word or words or general sense of the sentence touched are supposed to be a guide -- if only it could be interpreted correctly! All these ways are truly specific types of divination, so called, which had and still has almost innumerable forms.
In ancient times, however, when the Spiritual Wisdom of the ages, the Esoteric Tradition, still exerted enormous influence over the minds and hearts of men, because it was more or less commonly known in its more easily understood truths, there were true methods of arriving at some knowledge of the future at least, but always such methods took a legitimate and proper form, and were recognised and approved of by the State, and were placed under the control of the wisest and noblest men of the Commonwealth. We may instance the Greek Oracles in their prime. It has been the fashion in Europe since the final downfall of Greek civilization -- and in our own days also it is still the fashion of our literati -- to ridicule these Oracles of the ancients and their pronouncements, such as those of Apollo at Delphi, or those of Trophonius, also in Greece, mentioning here only two of the several that existed and were for ages so highly revered by all.
The cause of this ridicule is a non-understanding of the nature and meaning of the ancient Oracles, and an entire misapprehension of their reaches and functions, or in many cases it arises in religious antagonism due to ignorance and prejudice. But let us ask ourselves a simple question: Is it conceivable that one of the most intellectual and naturally skeptical and mocking peoples who have ever lived on earth in historic times should send solemn embassies of State to consult these Oracles, notably the Oracle of golden Apollo at Delphi, unless through the centuries the minds and hearts of those keenly alert and intellectual Greeks -- who have given us so much that is still basic in our own civilization today -- had been trained by experience and swayed by conviction to believe that what the Oracles had told them at intervals through the ages, in times of stress and solemn supplication to the gods, was based on truth, and that they did wisely in doing their best to understand and follow the oracular responses when received?
These Oracles invariably gave their answers in symbolic language and in indirect form. This very indirection, this symbolologic method, has been the butt for the repeated satire and ridicule of modern or near-modern European scholars and students, simply because these men have not understood the principles involved nor the reasons why the responses took such form. It is human nature to make fun of what it does not understand! The famous answer given by the Oracle of Apollo to an embassy sent by Croesus, King of Lydia, will illustrate the point. Everyone knows the story: King Croesus of Lydia was at the time greatly disturbed by the movements, political and military, of the Persians, whose empire was widely contiguous with his own realm. Persia was then a mighty realm to the east of Lydia, and the Persians themselves were an aggressive people, highly intelligent, highly civilized, and ambitious, as such people always are in their prime. The question put to the Oracle in substance was this: "Shall King Croesus, in order to protect his own empire and people against the possible danger of a Persian invasion, make war upon the king and kingdom of the Persians?" In substance the answer came: "If King Croesus wars on the Persians, King Croesus will destroy a mighty empire."
It should be noticed here that if the answer had been a simple affirmative or negative, there would have been involved into the situation a direct and positive interference by divine power -- according to Greek ideas -- in human affairs; for the fundamental religious and philosophical principle of all ancient conduct was that man must work out his own destiny for his own weal or woe, and by the gifts of spirit and mind and heart and body which he has. The gods never interfere in the exercise of man's free will except as adjuvants or helpers to better things for the common good, when man himself has first acted in that direction. Hercules would not help the wagoner to pull his cart out of the ditch into which the wagoner's carelessness had let it roll until the man himself first put his own shoulder to the wheel and shoved with all his own strength. Thus was it left to the mind and heart of King Croesus himself to decide what course he ought to follow, a course of self-seeking in imperial aggrandizement, or one for the common good of all concerned; depending in the first instance solely upon his own sense and intuition of what was right to do and wrong to follow. This is simply the foundation of all morals. But the Oracle nevertheless gave an answer and in answering spoke the truth, thus including a solemn warning combined with a reaffirming of the moral law in its response to the Lydian embassy. King Croesus decided to make war on the Persians and their King Cyrus; and King Croesus lost his own kingdom: he destroyed in very truth a mighty empire!
No one among the ancient Greek philosophers or wise men, and no Theosophist today, learning wisdom and the truths of Nature under Theosophy the Interpreter, supposed or supposes that Apollo, God of the Sun, sat or stood somewhere invisible in personal form and dictated his answer in unclear words to the Priestess, the Pythoness, who sat waiting the inspiration on a tripod, and who, receiving them, conveyed the words thus received to the stately embassy of Croesus, King of Lydia. No, the idea was this: Even as there always have been great Seers, so also can any normal human being, by purity of life, by aspiration, and by study, so clarify and purify the inner man, that the Solar Ray -- to follow the Greek idea, that part of us which they said is a part of the spiritual Sun -- may convey truth to the receptive mind of the Seer. In olden days, the Priestess of Apollo was always a young virgin, but in later times, during a certain war, a terrible thing happened at Delphi in the Temple of the Oracle there, and ever afterwards the Oracle was represented by an elderly woman of spotless life.
As long as the Oracles in Greece functioned, they never failed the inquirers who questioned them, whether these were States or individuals; and the Greeks thus had a sure source of spiritual help, and a steady and never-failing intellectual support, as long as they themselves sought the proper way and thus were, in the main, expectant of obtaining an answer that was not a response to aggressive human selfishness. The interpretations of the answers received, through the ages, were frequently entrusted to the noblest and wisest in the State, if the matter were of public import.
The habit of referring to the Hebraeo-Christian Bible as a means of divination is not today as popular nor as widespread as once it was; but there are still people who look upon this collection of scriptural writings in somewhat the same light as their forefathers did, and consult it in somewhat the same manner that the ancient Romans followed when using for the same purpose the Sibylline Books. In an article called 'The Bible Today: A Modern View of Inspiration' by Frederick Keller Stamm, he says:
There has been a radical departure from the idea that the Bible contains mysteries beyond our reason, revealed and guaranteed to us as true, either by marvelous signs such as miracles, or by the infallible pronouncement of the official church. The authority of the Bible is based on the revelation of self-evidencing truth. We have been released from the view which expresses itself in the dictum, "If anything is in the Bible, it must not be questioned, it must simply be accepted and obeyed," and a truer approach to authority has been opened to us by saying, "If it is in the Bible, it has been tried and found valuable by a great many people. Question it as searchingly as you can, try it for yourself, and see whether it proves itself true."
The reason for calling attention to this ultra-modern view of the Hebraeo-Christian Bible, and Bible-consultation for purposes of divination, is that here in this extract we see clearly a very modern re-echoing -- although in the form of disapproval -- of the old idea that truth is found in a book, which, though it be no longer considered to be infallible, is yet one of the best books, perhaps the very best, to consult when in trouble or sorrow, or, mayhap, when searching for the best path to follow in the midst of life's problems. This itself is a form of minor divination, speaking generally. One is no longer expected, however, to look within the Bible for the truths of Nature; one is to search within it for help and consolation; and if one can get anything good out of it, it is excellent! Well, nobody probably will object to this sort of mild divining-process, for it is quite harmless, and if such vague search is all that the truth-seeker is after, it may lead him on to consult others of the magnificent literatures of the world -- those of the other great world-religions and world-philosophies; and there, in very fact, the searcher will find noblest treasure-houses of spiritual and intellectual thinking, valuable beyond anything else in the world. But, after all, is there nothing but problematical help of a meager and tenuous kind to be gotten out of the Hebraeo-Christian holy book?
It was with the closing of the Mystery-Schools that spiritual night descended over the Occident. (151) Their degeneracy had been steadily increasing for several centuries before this event, and their formal abandonment was really contemporaneous with what one may describe as the definite downfall of the old Roman Empire. Men in the countries surrounding the Mediterranean had become involved more and more in selfishness and the affairs of the material world, and this had brought about the loss of the inner union or contact with the spiritual consciousness, which the Mysteries themselves had been originally established to support and bulwark.
The epochs and episodes of European history, especially in the lands surrounding the Inland Sea, that ensued after the downfall of the Roman Empire of the 'Pagans,' and the religious ideas which then began to appear and spread apace with the coming on of the Dark Ages -- in fact, leading to those Dark Ages and very largely responsible for them -- is a subject of general knowledge. Nevertheless, even in an era of crumbling spiritual and intellectual ideals, and the consequent bewilderment which men of all classes then feel, as was the case after the actual breaking up of the Roman government and general polity, it would be both historically inaccurate and trifling to suppose that the eternally inquisitive and searching mind of man brings forth no new ideas and finds no 'new' bases of thought thus providing at least some kind of intellectual anchorage. As a matter of fact, and as has been hinted at in the previous pages of this chapter, such periods of transition are always marked by unusual and often vigorous forms of mental activity, precisely as we see it today all over the world in our own era of transition, involving as it does the dissolution of former principles of thought and conduct and the novelties both spiritual and intellectual which are perceptible today at every turn.
In addition to the new religious ideas which were then daily gaining wider vogue in both the Eastern and Western parts of the Graeco-Roman world, there was what must have been to thinking men of the time an almost embarrassing or bewildering influx of 'new' thoughts and 'new Movements,' these novelties being not solely of a religious character but also philosophical, mystical, and what today would be called 'scientific' -- although the scientific portion of these innovations was the least noteworthy and least popular.
As said, a certain part of this influx of what were then considered to be novel ideas pertained to what now would be called matters appertinent to scientific investigation and study, such as the astronomical notions derived mostly from Claudius Ptolemy, the Alexandrian astronomer-astrologer and mathematician, who flourished in the second century of the Christian Era, and who wrote what was at the time considered to be a remarkable book, which, by its original Greek title, was called He Megale Syntaxis, which may be translated as 'The Great Composition' -- meaning, in other words, a Complete Outline of Astronomy, which work the Arabs later took over distorting its title as Almagest.
Part of Ptolemy's work -- and a far larger part than has been commonly recognised by modern scholars -- was based on astronomical and astrological ideas taken over from the Mesopotamian regions, Babylonia and Assyria, in addition to scientific improvements and elaborations that Ptolemy himself introduced on the basis of astronomical and astrological science as it was commonly known and taught in Greece and Rome.
There were really great astronomers in Mesopotamia in earlier days; and it is a point to remember, that back of and within the wording or phrasing and figurative expressions of these old astronomical ideas there lies an esoteric significancy or explanation which is truly wonderful when properly understood.
It may be said that the parts or portions of his book which the great Alexandrian astronomer took over from his predecessors, the Babylonian astronomers, were somewhat as follows hereinunder, although it should be stated that Ptolemy of necessity having in mind the psychological and intellectual characteristics and peculiarities of the Greek and Roman worlds, more nimble and critical and intellectual in temperament than mystical in tendency and mental bias, 'wrote down' and reshaped, and veiled much that it is quite likely that he himself as a truly profound mind clearly understood, but was reluctant to have pass current under his name among peoples untrained in the method of mystical thinking, for ages so popular in the lands of the Euphrates and the Tigris.
These ancient Babylonian astronomer-astrologers taught that the Universe -- meaning our own Home-Universe, which is all that is inclosed within the encircling zone or boundaries of the Milky Way or Galaxy -- is composed or builded up of interlocking or interacting worlds or spheres of different degrees of ethereality from the spiritual to the material, and that these hierarchies could be envisaged under the figure of a scale or ladder of existence, the true Cosmic Ladder of Lives, this ladder consisting of ten degrees or steps or 'rungs' ranging from earth, or the grossest matter known, upwards and inwards to the tenth or most ethereal degree or step, which tenth degree or, more accurately speaking, the all-inclosing Ocean of Space, was called the Primum Mobile -- the 'first movable.'
These ten degrees or steps on the Ladder of Life, of Kosmic Life, and forming by means of the aggregated hierarchies the substance itself of our own Home-Universe surrounding us, these ancient astrological-astronomers set forth or taught somewhat after the following manner: first and lowest, Earth; next, the Sphere of Water; then that of Air; then that of Fire; these being the four common Elements universally recognised in the ancient World as the basis of a complete Hierarchy of ten degrees, the six higher degrees usually being left unnamed, except that the fifth from the bottom was frequently called Aether -- otherwise the quintessence, i.e., the Fifth Essence.
Then, leaving the Sphere of Earth, came the Sphere of the Moon; then that of Mercury; then that of Venus; then that of the Sun; then the Sphere of Mars; then that of Jupiter; then that of Saturn; then the eighth, or the sphere of the 'Fixed' Stars; then the ninth they called the Empyrean -- the Cosmic Sphere in which move the Wandering Stars or comets, and in which the nebulae are seen; then the tenth and last, the Primum Mobile, surrounding as with a crystalline shell the entire universe as just enumerated. The usage of this word 'crystalline' did not mean actually real crystal or glass, as it sometimes has been really stupidly misunderstood; but the reference is to the transparency or translucency of interstellar space: we in our modern days would probably call it the surrounding ether. This Kosmic Hierarchy thus considered to include everything that the spacial reaches imbody; this consistent and coherent and self-contained Universal Whole; the ancient Mesopotamian sages said was itself contained in or included in the limitless and unbounded and surrounding 'Waters of Space' -- in other words, infinitude.
Ptolemy took these ideas over from the Babylonians more or less modified by himself in the manner above stated; and far later the mediaevalists during the European Dark Ages, who drew their astronomy from Ptolemy's great work, taught, as did he, that there were ten interlocking and interpenetrating spheres which in their aggregate compose our Kosmic Universe. It is obvious that they did not fully understand Ptolemy, however; and moreover, that their ideas regarding cosmogony and the cosmogonical structure and its operations, were very largely influenced by the misunderstood meaning of the first chapter of the Hebrew Genesis and the notions of the early Church-Fathers. Nevertheless, in this tenfold Universe of their conception, the mediaevalists retained a fundamental and vastly important principle of the archaic astronomical teaching of the formerly universal Wisdom-Religion, whether we call it the Esoteric Philosophy or the Esoteric Tradition or the Wisdom of the Gods or Archaic Theosophy.
It is clear enough that Theosophy or the Esoteric Tradition cannot be held responsible for the distortion of such fragments of its truths as have percolated through the minds of the mediaevalists to modern times in Europe; yet among its most important doctrines, as has been set forth elsewhere in this work, that of interlocking and interblending and interwoven Hierarchies, ranging from the divine to the physical, occupies a highly important position in its teachings concerning cosmogony, and its elaboration of this theme is one which is satisfactory in eminent degree to both intellect and one's sense of analogical reasoning, and is curiously in line, when properly understood, with many ultra-modern scientific ideas.
The adduction of this instance of how a fundamental and far-reaching teaching of the Ancient Wisdom passed through and from its Mesopotamian presentation into the Greek mind of Ptolemy and others, thus profoundly affecting the psychological atmosphere of the Graeco-Roman world, is an illustration of the manner in which truths are transmitted not only from generation to generation but from people to people, often, alas, in such distorted form or formulation that it is oftentimes difficult for students of such latest distortion of the original teaching to find out just what that primal Doctrine was in its purity.
A number of other examples or illustrations might be adduced here were it at all necessary to the main argument of this chapter, or needful in order to trace the turning of the vast wheel of time and destiny; but as every competent scholar, and every well-read student of the religious and philosophical history of the nations which dwelt in the lands surrounding the European Inland Sea is fairly well acquainted with the manner in which mystical and religious ideas and philosophically mystical thoughts passed from land to land, it would be a waste both of time and of space to enter more largely upon this theme here.
The steady march of not only religious and philosophical ideas but historical events from Orient to Occident is so well recognised that even the Christian has sung: "Westward the course of empire takes its way." (152) There are a large number of works which have been written imbodying the studies and the conclusions of their authors on this steady progress in both time and place of ideas, and these works exist in virtually every cultured and literate European tongue. Christianity itself has been traced by some rather over-enthusiastic scholars and literati of a more or less dilettante character to ideas which were widespread in the Greek world at about the time of the accepted beginning of the Christian Era, some of these literary dilettanti, with more enthusiasm than critical judgment, even tracing the main body of Christian theological doctrine to Egypt, or to Assyria and Babylonia, or again to one or more of the schools of Greek philosophical and mythological thought, forgetting that the material imbodied in Christianity as a whole is a direct offspring, not from any one source of thought percolating from a single point, but from the common and more or less commonly accepted ideas which had wide currency in the Graeco-Roman world for a century or two preceding the opening of the Era called 'Christian.'
It is probably true that only those who have investigated the matter with real literary thoroughness and with the thoughtful care required, can appreciate how greatly the Graeco-Roman world was a true intellectual melting-pot or alembic of many different religions and philosophies at the time when Christianity arose, and that ideas, systems of thought, doctrinal biases or tendencies, and novelties in the way of religion and philosophy, had percolated to and permeated all strata of human society, so much so that the great cities around the Mediterranean like Alexandria, Antioch, Athens, Carthage, Rome, and others, were like great intellectual emporia or markets, wherein ideas jostled each other -- ideas often of the most disparate character, so that Indian thought brushed elbow with Druidic, and teachings even of the North Germanic peoples strove for place and power with other equally interesting and profound notions coming out of Syria, Persia, and elsewhere.
The illustration, therefore, which is given above, is merely adduced by way of example; and it has been selected because of its basic and wide-reaching importance in a religious and philosophic sense, for it imbodies not only cosmogonic and theogonic and therefore theologic principles, but bears powerfully upon mystical matters and the loftiest ethical principles.
It is probable that in all history as known to modern scholars and students, no more fascinating picture could be presented than that which the Graeco-Roman world offered at the time in question of the manner in which the turning of the Wheel of Thought and Human Destiny acts in its unceasing revolutions. For ages nations remain relatively separated from each other and to a certain extent apart in thought, receiving but small and apparently unimportant infiltrations from outside; then as the Wheel continues its turning, new life comes in flood, in spate, sweeping down barriers between peoples and nations, mixing and reforming, modeling and remodeling, so that once separate peoples, jealous of national characteristics and power, become melted into larger racial units. There is a really amazing similitude or similarity between our own world in transition today, and the world as it was in transition in the centuries just mentioned.
Yet everything passes. It would seem to the impartial and thoughtful student of human history that things were in the making, when the Roman Empire began, which promised to bring about an expansion of human thought and an enlargement of political frontiers which might have involved all of what is now the nations of Europe, had the onflowing course of time and events and the bright promise which seemed to have dawned at about the time of the foundation of the Roman Empire under Julius Caesar and Octavian not been checked in some as yet but obscurely understood manner; and instead of a continued ascent towards greater things, the course of destiny took a distinctly downward path, culminating in the deep and intellectually obscure valley of the Dark Ages. In these Dark Ages thenceforth there remained but vague memories, forgotten and half-forgotten recollections of the glory that was Greece, and the political splendor that was Rome.
The profound religious and philosophical ideas current and almost popular in the Graeco-Roman world when Octavian lived were now nearly passed away; but feeble rivulets of the once mighty river of human thought still flowed on, giving, nevertheless, to the Dark Ages such spiritual and intellectual inspiration and stimulating thought as human minds then could receive and use. Still, all through the Dark Ages, here and there, could still be perceived feeble glimmerings or flickerings of what was once a Great Light; and it was these feeble flickerings or glimmerings which actually became the seeds of the later intellectual awakening in Europe which men call the Renaissance. This awakening was later enormously aided by the rediscovery of some of the grandest works of Greek literature after the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans and the consequent dispersal of the contents of libraries over the intellectually darkened West. Thenceforward human thought began to strive anew to burst the bonds of dead-letter and cramping dogma; and bitter indeed the struggle later became.
It is comforting to the earnest student of life and of the intricate pathways of human destiny to know that although the human race, or rather branches of it or portions of it, may at times, in its evolutionary journey, pass downward into the valleys of obscuration both spiritual and intellectual, nevertheless humanity is watched over and guided, yet strictly according to karmic law and justice, by Titan Intellects, Men of advanced evolutionary unfoldment whose Great Work it is to instil into human consciousness from time to time, as the ages flow on, ideas not only of natural verities but of spiritual and ethical worth. Humanity is at no time abandoned of these Elder Brothers of the human race; but even in the darkest epochs of human history individuals are selected or chosen because of innate spiritual and intellectual capacity, and often unknown to themselves are occultly inspired with new and brilliant and stimulating ideas of which such chosen individuals thus become the voices unto their fellow-men.
Likewise, from time to time when the ages become ripe for it, special envoys or Messengers are sent forth from the great Brotherhood of these Seers and Sages who strike anew the old, old strings of human inspiration and thought, and who thus become the visible and publicly active Teachers and Saviors of the human race, appearing as they do among this people or among that.
Often, again, epoch-making ideas or brilliant suggestions are deliberately, and with noble humanitarian purpose, set floating in human minds, these ideas passing oft-times like wildfire from brain to brain; and thus unusual men, although far inferior in spiritual penetration and in intellectual power to the Teachers above mentioned, are set intellectually aflame by these permeant ideas or thoughts, and become themselves subordinate though often imperfect helpers or inspirers of others.
Newer ideas forming the basis of later and more important discoveries in Europe thus appeared at different times in the Middle Ages. Examples were the theories and studies of Nikolaus Krebs of the fifteenth century, and of Pico Count di Mirandola of the sixteenth century, and especially the cosmogonical and astronomical notions of Kopernik (Koppernigk latinized as Copernicus), the German-Pole. As every school-boy knows, these new ideas and the literary works which they gave birth to aroused a vast deal of antagonism on the part of the authorities, ecclesiastical and civil alike, in European countries. Indeed, the men who thereafter adopted these new ideas, followed later by the unfortunate Galileo and a rapidly increasing host of thinkers, suffered the all too common fate of pioneers in human thought; but as is always the case when truth is with them, their ideas and their work finally prevailed.
Nikolaus or Nikolas Krebs was born at Kues, near Trier, Germany, in 1401 and died in 1464. The son of a poor boatman was this remarkable man, who later was made a Cardinal of the Church of Rome, and called, from the town of his birth, Cardinal de Cusa. His extraordinary genius in investigation, and in what was then broad-minded and courageous exploration of the mysteries of the nature surrounding him and of the inspirations of his own inner nature, brought upon him charges of heresy including that of pantheism; and it is likely that only the personal friendship of three Popes, who seemed to stand in reverential awe of the genius of this great man, saved him from the fate which later befell Giordano Bruno, and still later, but in less degree, Galileo.
Cardinal de Cusa has often been called a 'Reformer before the Reformation' -- this statement being both graphic and true. He anticipated, in many if not all of its essentials, the later discovery of Copernicus in astronomy, as regards the sphericity of the Earth as a planetary body and its orbital path around the Sun; and he also did no small pioneer work in popularizing such ancient Greek learning and thought as then existed in more or less imperfect Latin translations of older dates. In his book, De docta ignorantia, is found the following passage:
The world may not be, possibly, absolutely boundless, yet no one is able to figurate it as finite, because human reason refuses to give it limits. . . . Just as our earth cannot be in the center of the Universe, as is supposed, no more can the sphere of the fixed stars be that center. . . . Therefore the World is like an immense machine, having its center everywhere, and its circumference nowhere. . . . (153) Hence, because the earth is not at the center, it cannot be motionless. . . and although it is much smaller than the sun, it should not be concluded from this that it is more vile. . . . We cannot see whether its inhabitants are superior to those who dwell nearer to the sun, or in the other stars, for sidereal space cannot be destitute of inhabitants. . . . The earth is, most probably, one of the smallest globes, yet it is the cradle of intelligent beings, noble and perfect in a sense. (154)
This is a remarkable statement for a Roman Cardinal to have made; and more than one student of this great man's work has wondered if there were not in the inner life of this noteworthy mediaeval thinker an inner guiding Genius or Daimon who led him intellectually on and guided his thoughts in such directions that the inner doors of his own being were thereby opened, so that he could see through them more deeply into Nature's arcana. In a period of European history when the Earth was thought to be flat and immovable and the center and only center of the Universe, and when the Sun and the Moon and stars and other celestial bodies were supposed to revolve around it, he taught the sphericity and rotation of our Earth! He taught that this Earth was not the only globe in sidereal space to give birth to intelligent beings; and other things now accepted as common knowledge found in every elementary school. His knowledge of natural truths most probably first came to him from reading what remained in literature of the works of the ancient Pythagorean and possibly Neo-Platonic thinkers and scientists. One may truly ask oneself, whether this man ever held -- albeit privately -- the ancient Pythagorean doctrine of the metempsychosis of the soul, and its repetitive reimbodiments both in human flesh and possibly elsewhere.
Two hundred years and more after Nikolaus Krebs, there lived the Frenchman, Blaise Pascal, (155) who wrote:
Let man not stop in contemplation of simply the objects which surround him. Let him contemplate Universal nature in its high and full majesty. Let him consider that dazzling luminary, situated like an eternal lamp, in order to illuminate the universe. Let the earth seem to him to be a mere point by comparison with the vast circle that this star describes; and let him stand amazed in reflecting that this vast circle itself is but a point, very small with regard to that which the stars that sweep around the firmament embrace. But should our vision stop there, then let our imagination pass beyond it. Imagination, again, sooner grows weary than nature does in furnishing still larger bounds. All that we see of the world is but an imperceptible spot [point] within the ample bosom of nature. No idea can approach the sweep of its spaces. We may expand our conceptions to our utmost: and we give birth to atoms in size only. Nature is an infinite sphere, of which the Center is everywhere, the circumference nowhere . . . . (156)
It is thus that another great man in his way attempts to describe -- Infinity! Even here, apparently, in this otherwise remarkable picture of a thoughtful mind struggling for freedom, one discerns the crippling effect of the then prevalent geocentric theory of Nature; and yet the fine figure of speech with which Pascal closes this passage, probably drawn from Krebs as above stated, is virile with the suggestion that though Pascal may have openly conformed to the geocentric idea, his intuition rejected it as an astronomical truth. (157)
This sublime idea that the Divine -- and necessarily therefore what we call Infinite Nature -- has its center everywhere and a limiting boundary or circumference nowhere, while likewise a purely Theosophical idea, is also a very ancient one. It was, for instance, taught by the Pythagorean philosophers in ancient Greece. It was and still is taught by all the schools, by all the thinkers -- and magnificent thinkers some of them were -- of all the schools of the ancient Hindu philosophies and religions. It was in the background of the teaching of all the Sages of all the ages; and, in more modern times, it has reached us also as the splendid speculation of certain great men.
What, indeed, is this Universe in which we live: this Universe of which we for ever are inseparable parts, component portions thereof, and therefore either self-consciously or unconsciously co-operating agents in the Great Kosmic Labor? We cannot ever separate ourselves from the All, for we are parts of IT. What are we then in our inmost being? An answer to this question obviously answers the former query. We are essentially monads; eternal, unitary, individual, life-centers, consciousness-centers; and, because of the very stuff of the Cosmic Stuff, deathless, ageless, unborn, universal in essence. Therefore each one such Monad and their number is infinite, since the Universe is infinite, since the Kosmos both invisible and visible is without any limits or boundaries whatsoever except as aggregated hierarchies, extending in all directions limitlessly, everywhere, inwards and outwards -- therefore, each one such Monad-center or fundamental-spiritual Life-Atom is mystically and factually a center of the universe, whether such central point be one of us humans or an inhabitant of some far-distant sidereal body, a living entity or 'life' on one of the immensely distant so-called 'island-universes' that our modern scientists describe to us as existing outside the encircling zone of our Milky Way -- each one such Monadic center is the center of the all for the simple reason that, as an old teaching of ours has it, the Divine or the All -- the invisible or divine-spiritual side of Invisible Nature -- is THAT, which has its center everywhere, and its circumference or limiting boundary nowhere. (158)
This sublime conception alone furnishes food for reflexion for a lifetime; because it shows why each one such spiritual center or each one such Monad is in its inmost the central point of the Boundless All, having its center or centers everywhere. Furthermore, such reflexion shows us that there is a Path leading into the inmost of the Boundless All, which -- paradox of paradoxes -- can never through eternity be reached; and this path is each one of us: every human being is himself this Path leading inwards for ever to the ever-unattainable 'Heart' of the Boundless Universe. Every center everywhere, every Monad, every living entity in the inmost of its inmost, is that path himself or itself; and this is precisely what Jesus the Syrian Sage, the avatara, speaking of his own inner divine Monad, had in mind when he uttered his 'dark saying,' "I am the Way [Path], the Truth, and the Life! (159)
No longer did the advancing knowledge concerning astronomical truths permit the teaching that our physical Earth, this small Earth on which we live, is the sole and only center of the Boundless Universe, and that all the planets, the Sun, and the Moon, and the stars also, circle around our Earth in concentric spheres. These newer teachers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of European history harked back to the old doctrine of Pythagoras of Greece and of his school, and often to the Neo-Platonists and their philosophical verities, whence these mediaeval Europeans drew as from a perennial fountain of wisdom and knowledge. The newer science now taught that the Sun is the center of our solar system, and that the planets revolve around this central Sun, and that the Earth is one of these planets so revolving.
These innovators were treated rather badly. When Columbus appeared before the doctors of the University of Salamanca and argued his case that the world was spherical and that there must exist continents beyond the Western Sea, he was told in substance: "You are wrong. It is impossible; the Bible does not teach it, and the Bible contains the truth of God." The Fathers of the Church knew of this fantastic doctrine of a rotund and spherical Earth, and they deliberately and pointedly rejected it. "Turn to Lactantius, for instance," they said, "and you will see what he has to say of Pythagoras and his teaching of the spherical nature of the Earth."
Lactantius' squabbling irony reads funnily today to us men of a wiser age, a kindlier age, indeed a more thoughtful age. Speaking of Pythagoras, the great Greek philosopher, he calls him "an old fool who taught old wives' fables" such as metempsychosis, and the sphericity of the Earth, and the heliocentric character of our solar system. He delivers himself of the following spiteful invective:
That old fool invented fables for credulous babies, as some old women do who have nothing else to do!
The folly of this foolish old fellow ought to be laughed to scorn!
How can people believe that there are antipodes under our feet? Do they say anything deserving of attention at all? Is there anybody so senseless as to believe that there are men living on the under side of the earth, whose feet thus are higher than their heads? Or that the things which with us grow upright, with them hang head downwards? That the crops and trees grow downwards? That rains, and snows, and hail, fall upwards to the surface of the earth? . . . These people thought that the earth is round like a ball . . . and that it has mountains, extends plains, and contains level seas, under our feet on the opposite side of the earth: and, if so, it follows that all parts of such an earth would be inhabited by men and beasts. Thus the rotundity of the earth leads to the idiotic idea of those antipodes hanging downwards! . . . I am absolutely at a loss to know what to say about such people, who, after having erred in one thing, consistently persevere in their preposterous folly, and defend one vain and false notion by another; but perhaps they do it as a joke, or purposely and knowingly defend lies for the purpose of showing their ingenuity in defending falsehoods. But I should be able to prove by many arguments that it is utterly impossible for the sky to be underneath the earth, were it not that this my book must now come to an end. (160)
Alas! Why did not the self-satisfied and egoistic Lactantius give us of his own arguments? Surely they would be interesting reading today!
The theological doctors of Salamanca further said in substance to Columbus: "You take your life in your hands, and the lives of your officers and men, if you sail so far out into the unknown sea!" (161)
Had Columbus listened to his opposers and objectors, and had he renounced his project: had he not had the royal favor and aid: how long would it have been before some other hardy spirit would have embarked from a European port, sailing westwards to imperishable fame? It surely would have come to pass; but this in no wise detracts from the merit of the enterprising Genoese. During his transit of two and a half months' duration, he had a near-mutiny among his men; for after sailing so many weeks, and seeing no land, the men, believing in a flat earth, thought that the time was not far distant when they would come to the rim or edge of the earth and there would fall over and off it in a titanic Niagara into empty space, or into the bottomless abyss. Nevertheless Columbus persisted, and sailed his three little vessels westwards over the stormy Atlantic. Today the tomb of Columbus bears the engraven inscription: A Castilla y a Leon nuevo mundo dio Colon: To Castile and to Leon, Columbus gave a new world!
The doctors of Salamanca were not alone in their mistaken and fantastic ideas. The entire Christian world held the same notions, with the exceptions of the noble-minded few who were courageous enough openly to state their faith, and perhaps many others who lacked the courage openly to confess their beliefs. What did Martin Luther have to say of his contemporary, Copernicus? He said:
People listen to an unknown astrologer who tries to show that the earth rotates, and not the heavens nor the firmament nor the sun and the moon. Everyone who hankers after being thought clever forthwith devises some new-fangled system, which of course is considered to be the very best of all systems. This fool desires to overthrow the entire system of astronomy; but Holy Writ tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth.
But Martin Luther was not the only one of his day to turn against the heliocentricism of Copernican astronomy, his co-worker in Germany, Melanchthon, wrote in his turn of Copernicus as follows:
Our eyes themselves prove to us that the heavens revolve around the earth in the space of twenty-four hours. But certain men, whether from love of novelty, or in order to display their ingenuity, are teaching that it is the earth that moves; and they assert that neither the eighth sphere nor the sun revolves around the earth. . . . It is simply a lack of honesty and decency to declare such fantasies in public, and the example is pernicious. It is the part of a sound mind to take the truth as revealed by God and to accept it.
What did Calvin say about Copernicus?
Who is it who dares to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Ghost?
Even when Galileo, in the first third of the seventeenth century, appeared before his ecclesiastical examiners and set forth his theories of the nature of the Universe which surrounds us, and of how, as he put it, the Earth is not the center of the Universe, and that the Sun and the stars and the moon do not arise in the east in the morning, pass over our heads during the day, and set in the west in the evening, thus partaking of the supposed revolving sphere of the heavens moving around the immovable Earth, his theories -- which were those of Copernicus, and others which Galileo had accepted -- were condemned as heretical, contrary to 'faith,' and therefore untrue. These judges of Galileo were no doubt earnest men and thoughtful men, after their poor lights, doing what they believed to be the best for the welfare of their fellows; but belief and good intentions are no guarantees that men possess truth: good intentions are not enough, for men must have knowledge, men must know truth.
These cardinals and bishops in solemn conclave assembled declared:
That the earth is not the center of the Universe, and that it moves even with a daily rotation, is indeed an absurd proposition, and is false in philosophy; and theologically considered, at the least is erroneous in Faith. (162)
Karman makes short work of human ignorance, and of human pride, the offspring of ignorance. Galileo was right from the astronomical standpoint, which is the standpoint of visible nature, and he thought with his teachers, the ancient Pythagorean sages, and taught what they taught, as he understood it; for Galileo, despite his inquisitive mental apparatus, was no initiate as many of the Pythagorean sages were. (163)
It would, of course, be an exceedingly interesting study, having both its pathos and its diversions, to trace the gradual opening and expansion of European intellect from the downfall of the Graeco-Roman civilization to the Renaissance in Europe, and thus onwards or forwards to the times when European activity took a definitely scientific and in many respects a materialistic turn -- let us say the age of Newton and his immediate predecessors. But this work has been admirably well done by many writers holding different views; nor is the present work such as to require the inclusion of this study in its pages. It suffices merely to point to the manner in which the great turning Wheel of human Thought, and therefore of human Destiny, has taken place through the revolving centuries.
It is quite probable that no open or public theosophical effort, such as was begun by the founding of the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875 by H. P. Blavatsky and others, could have taken place at any period between the time of the closing of the Mystery-Schools under the Emperor Justinian and the beginning of the nineteenth century -- an observation which applies to Europe and later to America of course; and it is unquestionably true that the appearance of H. P. Blavatsky with the Message that she brought to the West in the time when she came was well fitted into its proper cycle, and its consequences foreseen.
This does not mean that the Great brotherhood made no effort to aid and help during the long centuries intervening between the two periods just mentioned, for the exact contrary is the case, as already has been stated. A number of minor movements of a more or less veiled mystical and philosophical character usually working under the guise or garment of conventional religion took place and did what work they could do. Individuals also were aided and in many cases inspired in the degree to which such inspiration could be received by their imperfectly developed spiritual and intellectual and psychical faculties, to promulgate a few at least of the ideas of the Archaic Wisdom, in such manner and after such forms, however feeble they may have been, as to meet with some possibility of success in impressing the minds of different ages.
The modern Theosophical Society and its members have been in the past fifty years or more somewhat in the same relation to established authority, religious and scientific, that Copernicus and others and their respective followers held to the generations in which as individuals they lived. Even as those often noble-minded and self-denying men were not infrequently called by discourteous and impolite epithets, such as imbeciles, idiots, dreamers, heretics, and what not, so were modern Theosophists in the beginning of their work called by the same or closely similar names; but that period of sometimes angry and always ignorant denouncement is today virtually ended. Yet even at present, so strongly are the passing ideas, whether of a religious or scientific character, held to, that when our Theosophical doctrines are voiced before audiences unacquainted with their tenor and their import, it is not unknown still to find otherwise perfectly intelligent, kindly, and well-meaning people indulging in critical remarks which are often as diverting as they are shallow. As for instance: "Why, that statement is not right. That is not what the scientists teach. I do not believe that. There is no foundation in Nature for it."
These unthinking ones forget that there is nothing so changeable as science itself -- few departments of human thought which are so mutable -- and thank the immortal gods that it is so mutable! True Science, as represented by its most noble exponents and students, is always advancing and always learning; and that fact is to its greatest and highest credit, and is the one thing more than any other, perhaps, at least from one standpoint, for which we all should be grateful to these high-minded and often self-sacrificing men who are devoting their lives to searching as far as they can and may into Nature's secret and recondite places for ever more light. Yes, Science is changeable, very changeable; it changes with every lustrum or two, so that what is supposed to be truth -- accepted scientific truth -- today, in five or ten years from now will be discredited and considered to be -- as exactly it is -- just one more step forwards on the path of discovery: although while it was considered a truth, it had mathematical demonstration, it had, perchance, a modicum of philosophical demonstration, and all the other methods and ways of scientific thinking and research were collected and brought together in proof of and support of it.
This is just as it should be, but to the reflective mind the situation is one which demonstrates clearly that the changing and therefore passing views of any one scientific generation, to be succeeded by another and others, are no permanent or durable intellectual foundation upon which to base and erect a superstructure of thought to take the place which Religion and Philosophy, derivative from nature's structure and operations alone, can occupy. This observation is directed specifically to the totally erroneous idea so widely current in modern times that scientific views are the Religion and Philosophy of the present. Mankind were, indeed, in a perilous situation were the only true Religion and true philosophy, which it can know, the scientific ideas and notions and teachings and deductions which inside of a generation may be utterly overthrown for something new, for something novel. Here is the reason why the theosophist, while holding in his heart and mind immense respect for the work of scientific men, as aiding in the emancipation of the human intellect, nevertheless is obliged to look upon scientific hypotheses and theories as being just what they are -- ideas of a generation, to be followed by newer ones. The student of the Esoteric Philosophy, the Esoteric Tradition, is as convinced as he can be of anything human in this world of changing scenes and shifting thought, that sooner or later mankind as a whole will once again become keenly conscious of the fact that there exists in the world a WISDOM which once was the common property of the human race over the earth, and which, as several times before stated in this work, is what the Theosophist calls by various names, such as the esoteric tradition or the Esoteric Philosophy or the Wisdom of the Gods, and in modern times by the term theosophy. It is only this WISDOM, which is KNOWEDGE of THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES, which can adequately feed the hunger of the human intellect and supply the spiritual and ethical needs of the human heart. How great is the need for this KNOWLEDGE -- the knowing of things-in-themselves, i. e., the essence of things, what the German philosopher, Kant, had in mind with reference to the essence of an individual existence as Das Ding an sich!
The pathway to Wisdom for any individual human being is within. Those human beings who became the great sages, became such because they followed that inner pathway leading ever more inwards, until each individual of them became at-one with his own inner god and therefore knew truth, because the inner god of each one of us is an inseparable part of the infinite Universe. They thus learned what the universe is, how it works, how it functions, yes, even what the real form of the Kosmic Figure is. Guardians of the mystic, archaic Wisdom-Religion as they are and have been through the ages, it was from them that the ancient peoples learned of the truths of Nature: through and from them, and also because of the exercise of the same inner faculties of vision by individuals, and from the keen powers of observation that we know that they possessed, as we ourselves do -- once we learn to trust our inner powers and to confide in them as being what they are, the only source of knowledge. A robot is an amazingly clever mechanical construction, but it is obvious that a robot is unable to grasp the truths of the Universe and to understand them, because it is not a MAN.
Mighty men indeed were some of these ancients, men whose names today even are revered. Nevertheless in many cases it has been customary in Occidental countries during the small period of time of fifteen hundred years or more last past, to speak of them as being individuals whose scientifically untutored faculties and aspiring but more or less untrained understanding nevertheless brought forth those marvels of religious and philosophical 'ingenuity' which were the great systems of human thought which even today our greatest men study and revere. How normally sensible thinkers of our times have ever been able to voice the imbecile theory of past human ignorance, such as it has until recent times been all too popular to suppose, with the known intuitional power and strength of intellect that the great and greater among the ancients had, is a fact which is a perennial cause of amazement to every thoughtful spirit.
But the explanation is simple enough, and it is this: that during the last fifteen hundred years or so, there was practically no organized scientific research into Nature, and no knowledge of Nature whatsoever, except the small and half-forgotten remnants of knowledge that came over into the Dark Ages from those ancient nations surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. Indeed, intellectual progress and the accumulation of scientific data were virtually unknown, with certain rare exceptions that are the more notable because of their rarity. Slowly growing knowledge of Nature, in other words the advancing science of European civilization, in time broke down the self-sufficient religious and quasi-mystical egoism of our forefathers of the Dark and later Mediaeval periods, and there then succeeded to the self-sufficient egoisms of mediaeval times, the equivalently self-sufficient egoism of the new-born spirit of discovery and research.
It is true that various scientific men made great advances in knowledge of Nature after Galileo's day. From that fateful day for Galileo, June 22, 1633, when the solemn conclave of cardinals and bishops officially condemned his teachings as false, up to the time of Laplace, the great French astronomer, wonderful strides ahead were made in knowledge of the physical universe in which we live. But concurrently there ensued very definitely a progressive losing of the intuitive sense of the existence of inner and ethereal and spiritual worlds, and hence to a certain extent also, a loss of spiritual values, so that there began to grow in the minds of men a narrow materialism which reached its culmination in our own age in the closing years of the nineteenth century, say about 1900.
But this materialism which then waxed so strong and widespread in its influence over men's souls, met and underwent a totally unexpected series of intellectual shocks brought about by newly discovered truths of Nature, which new truths were almost wholly the discoveries of scientific men themselves who had, as it were, almost suddenly begun to obtain new and dazzling insights into hitherto unsuspected verities lying behind and within Nature's physical veil.
However, even as late as thirty years ago, many scientific thinkers and speculators were so desperately afraid of dropping back into the old ruts of mediaeval scholastic thinking, that they deliberately blinded themselves to the necessary deductions and inferences which the succeeding generation of scientific workers, pointing to the facts of Nature, have now made known to all.
In the first days of modern physical discovery practically all the researchers into Nature were more or less under the influence of mediaeval thought, of mediaeval ideas; ideas, that is to say, of so-called 'witchcraft,' and heaven knows what else of that kind of stuff; and of the ideas then held with regard to the atomistic theories of Democritus and Epicurus and of Lucretius: in short of the atomistic school of ancient Greece. This modern atomistic philosophy began definitely to be widely influential in the beginning of the nineteenth century, and it was an intellectually wholesome and salutary thing as far as it went; but unfortunately it went too far in a literal interpretation of the work of the ancient Greek atomists, and thus became in time the crass materialism so popular in the nineteenth century. The student of physics forty or more years ago was then taught that the physical universe is all that there is: that it had no inner spiritual roots, that it hung, as it were, in and from nothingness, or in the so-called hypothetical ether -- in other words was rooted in nothing of a spiritual character; and that it was nevertheless a self-contained system; that the amount of energy in that hypothetical universe so set forth was fixed, determined; that nothing could enter it from without, and nothing could leave it. These two foundation-stones, these two pillars of the older science of our fathers, were the 'physical correlation of forces' and the 'conservation of mass' -- likewise the 'conservation of energy.'
The idea of the 'correlation of forces' was actually, if analysed sufficiently, that spiritual thinking, that the play of man's emotions, that the exercise of intellectual thought, and that the psychic movements of his soul, could be transmuted, transformed, into physical motion; and this we do not deny, for these various operations of man's inner constitution are in fact the result of the action of forces; and the physical proof of it is that they can move physical things. I lift my arm; I walk; I think; I talk; I can in moderate degree change the aspect and course of Nature; I do all these things that a man does. Now, what is it that is the driving power behind these operations of mine? It is energy, or force, which in these cases is the working of the soul or spirit; and what does the name matter which we for the moment give to this force? In one aspect we can call it force or energy; in another aspect we call it the functions of consciousness and life.
Equivalently, therefore, according to the old idea of the 'correlation of forces,' friction of molecules, or some electrical machine, or heat, can produce the works of genius of the ages, because these forces can be transformed, according to that old theory, into spiritual and intellectual and psychic work! The great freethinker of his day, Colonel Robert Ingersoll, once made the statement in substance: "Is it not wonderful that a piece of bread in the chemistry of the human body can be transmuted into the immortal works of Shakespeare?" This, to the Theosophist, is simply a foolish statement; it is impossible to imagine how such alchemy could be done. But human thought can do it. Whereas bread nourishes the physical body in which that living thought lives and works, it is the living thought and not the bread which produces the work of genius! (164)
Scientific knowledge and discovery forty or more years agone were exceedingly egoistic, and dogmatic in a thoroughgoing way. One might summarize the view of the scientific student of the last quarter of the nineteenth century somewhat in the following words: "The marvelous discoveries made by scientific research within the last three or four generations have completely unveiled the mysteries of Nature to modern vision. There remains little more to be discovered in Nature or to be wrested from her bosom; but what the scientists of the future can do, will be to develop in detail the complete knowledge of Nature already gained."
There, not exaggerating a single thought, lay the substance of accepted views of science itself, and of its achievements, at that time. It is, however, one of the pleasantest reflexions that the modern man can make that the most prominently outstanding figures in science today, the true leaders of their scientific collaborators, are coming to unite in holding an incomparably wiser and loftier conviction concerning Science and its proper work for mankind. Ultra-modern science is steadily and indeed rapidly becoming distinctly metaphysical and mystical, however much these terms may displease many scientific men who are still more or less within the psychological and mental confines of the last generation. The greatest men of science today, in different ways, and by means of different methods of approach, seem, to judge from their writings and published statements, to have come to the definite conclusion that back of, behind, and within all physical Nature, there is constructive Mind, Consciousness, and mathematically working and guiding Intelligence of cosmic magnitude, permeating and guiding all things.
FOOTNOTES:
149. The Decline of the West 2:103 (return to text)
150. There were many forms of running after what would today be called psychic adventures during the time of the dissolution of the Roman Empire, and one of the most commonly practised and severely punished by the State, when it was discovered, because of its highly detrimental effect on the ethical and spiritual fiber of men, was what was called necromancy or traffic or communion with the shades of the dead. This took a number of forms, some too disgusting and revolting even to mention here, and others not revolting indeed but singularly familiar to modern ears.
The poets and historians of Greece and Rome in many instances refer to these various practices, and did so from remote ages, even including the great Homer, who in his Odyssey, (Bk. XI, vv. 30-224) describes the evocation by Odysseus of various persons from the infernal regions and his communing with these ghosts, these astral simulacra and reliquiae of dead men, remaining in the lowest regions of the Astral Light.
Ovid, Vergil, Lucan, and many more touch upon these unpleasant themes. Lucan in his Pharsalia, Bk. VI, gives a graphic description of the then common beliefs of the Graeco-Roman world in the power of the Thessalian witches of "bringing down the moon from heaven to earth" by means of unholy incantations, and their necromantic intercourse and practices with the shades of the dead, and describes how Sextus, the son of Pompey, driven by fear, goes to the Witch Erictha in order to learn the outcome of the war then waging.
There are a number of passages which would well repay careful study, and the following two extracts from Lucan, Pharsalia, Bk. VI, are examples in point:
"Coetus audire silentum,
Nosse domos Stygias, arcanaque Ditis operti,
Non superi, non vita vetat. . . ." -- vv. 513-5
"Haec ubi fata, caput spumantique ora levavit:
Adspicit adstantem projecti corporis umbram,
Exanimes artus invisaque claustra timentem
Carceris antiqui. Pavet ire in pectus apertum
. . . ." -- vv. 719-722, etc.
The common idea among the Mediterranean peoples, mentioned above, that the Thessalian witches could 'bring down the moon,' has always seemed utter nonsense to European classical scholars, simply because they have never understood what the phrase meant. However, anyone who has passed through the Third Degree of the initiatory rites will grasp the idea instantly, as indeed can anyone, but in less degree, who has received some intuitive knowledge of esoteric symbolologic method of speech, and who knows something at least of the role that the moon plays in the economy of Nature, and of how her emanations and influences and her functions can be to some extent modified by the masterful will of even a human magician -- of the 'left-hand,' of course. (return to text)
151. This closing of the Mystery-Schools and the consequent abandonment of their rites and the formal initiations that in a very late and degenerate age still took place in them, occurred in the sixth century by reason of a Decree or Rescript of the Emperor Justinian, and there would seem to be little doubt, at least to the mind of the impartial student of esoteric history, that Justinian's action was consequent upon a petition presented by the then thin and feeble band of Pagan philosophers who felt that the Mysteries had become so degenerate, or were about so to become, that it was better to bring about their cessation by their own act than to allow them to continue to become worse. (return to text)
152. Bishop George Berkeley: On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America. (return to text)
153. The ascription of this graphic figure of speech to the Frenchman Blaise Pascal as its inventor is inaccurate and indeed wrong. It is here seen that two centuries before Pascal, the famous German philosopher and theologian Nikolaus de Cusa wrote, as above quoted, in his most notable work De docta ignorantia: "This world resembles a vast mechanism, having its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere" -- machina mundi quasi habens ubique centrum et nullibi circumferentiam.
In the same work, this great man anticipated the ideas and teaching of Copernicus and Galileo, stating in the clearest words that the Earth is not the center of the universe, and that just because the Earth is not at the center of the World, therefore it is in motion. He also went beyond both Copernicus and Galileo in his declaration that not even the mighty sphere of the 'fixed stars' is in the center of the Universe, for that "center" is "everywhere," as above quoted.
Cusanus was a soul born into earth-life centuries before his 'proper' intellectual period, and he was made to suffer for his attempts to enlighten the then prevailing spiritual and intellectual gloom. Such seems to be the lamentable fate of all who come before their natural time -- whether by choice, or otherwise! ("On Learned Ignorance." (return to text)
154. De docta ignorantia ('On Learned Ignorance'). (return to text)
155. (1623-1662) (return to text)
156. Pensees, ch. 22 (return to text)
157. Yet, strange mystery indeed, some of the most enlightened of the ancient Sages taught a doctrine which when properly understood in its secret or esoteric implications, shows that aside from the maya (illusion) of the geocentric, and as taught in the Middle Ages utterly false, idea, there is imbodied in it a verity delivered unto those who were found worthy to receive it. (return to text)
158. "The Highest of all is ubiquitous yet nowhere in particular. Furthermore, the highest Divine is at once everywhere in its fulness for it is the 'everywhere' itself, and, furthermore, all manner of being. The highest Divine must never be thought as being in the everywhere, but itself is the everywhere as well as the origin and source of all other beings and things in their unending residence in the everywhere." -- Plotinus: Enneads, 'Free Will and Individual Will,' vi, viii, 16 (return to text)
159. (John, xiv, 6.) (return to text)
160. Lactantius: The Divine Institutes, Bk. III, ch. xxiv. (return to text)
161. It is a well-known fact of history that Columbus nevertheless sailed westwards in his three small vessels, with a body or crew of officers and men numbering a hundred, more or less. He left Palos on August 3, 1492, and in somewhat less than two and a half months of sailing, touched at an American island, on October 12th, Old Style, 1492; or New Style, October 22nd. (return to text)
162. "Terram non esse centrum mundi, nec immobilem, sed moveri motu etiam diurno, est item propositio absurda, et falsa in philosophia, et theologice considerata ad minus erronea in fide." -- Congregation of Bishops and Cardinals, June 22, 1633.
The original Italian, in its Roman dialectal form, of the Latin sentence above, is thus given in the Sentence, or 'Sentenza,' as follows:
"Che la terra non sia centro del mondo, ne immobile, ma che si move etiandio di moto diumo, e parimenti proposizione assurda, e falsa in filosofia, e considerata in teologia, ad minus erronea in fide." (return to text)
163. As a matter of historical interest, it may be stated that it was only in 1757, on the eleventh of May, that Pope Benedict XIV signified his consent to expunge the clause of the decree of March 5, 1616, which prohibited all books teaching that the sun is stationary and that the earth revolved around it. Again, it was only on September 11, 1822, that the College of Cardinals of the Inquisition agreed to permit the printing and publication of works at Rome teaching the Copernican or modern system of astronomy, and this decree was ratified by Pope Pius VII on September 25 of that year. Yet it was not until 1835 that Galileo's prohibited works were removed formally from the Index.
"Dichiarono permessa in Roma la stampa e la publicatioe operum tractantium de mobilitate terrae et immobilitate solis, juxta communem modernorum astronomorum opinionem," -- Olivieri, p. 97, or Hist.-polit. Blatter, p. 588. (return to text)
164. The famous German chemist, von Liebig, has well expressed his disgust at the grossly materialistic ideas of his time in writing as he did: "I would more readily believe that a book of chemistry or of botany could grow out of dead matter, than believe that a leaf or a flower could be formed or could grow by merely chemical forces." He but echoed the archaic wisdom and thinking. (return to text)