prayers, sent to a common Almighty God for mutual destruction, where, then, shall we draw the line between Pagan and Christian? And who can doubt that all Protestant England would rejoice and offer thanks to the Lord, if, during some future war, 400 ships of the hostile fleet were to be wrecked owing to such holy prayers. What is, then, the difference, we ask again, between a Jupiter, a Boreas, and a Jehovah? No more than this: The crime of one's own next-of-kin—say of one's "father" —is always excused and often exalted, whereas the crime of our neighbour's parent is ever gladly punished by hanging. Yet the crime is the same.

So far the "blessings of Christianity" do not seem to have made any appreciable advance on the morals of the converted Pagans.

The above is not a defence of Pagan gods, nor is it an attack on the Christian deity, nor does it mean belief in either. The writer is quite impartial, and rejects the testimony in favour of either, neither praying to, believing in, nor dreading any such "personal" and anthropomorphic God. The parallels are brought forward simply as one more curious exhibition of the illogical and blind fanaticism of the civilized theologian. For, so far, there is not a very great difference between the two beliefs, and there is none in their respective effects upon morality, or spiritual nature. The "light of Christ" shines upon as hideous features of the animal-man now, as the "light of Lucifer" did in days of old.

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Those unfortunate heathens in their superstition regard even the Elements as something that has comprehension ! They still have faith in their idol Vayu—the god or, rather, Demon of the Wind and Air. . . they firmly believe in the efficacy of their prayers, and in the powers of their Brahmins over the winds and storms. . (The Missionary Lavoisier, of Cochin, in the Journal des Colonies.) In reply to this, we may quote from Luke viii., 24: "And he (Jesus) arose and rebuked the Wind and the raging of the Water, and they ceased and there was a calm." And here is another quotation from a prayer book: Oh, Virgin of the Sea, blessed Mother and Lady of the Waters, stay thy waves..." etc., etc. (prayer of the Neapolitan and Provencal sailors, copied textually from that of the Phoenician mariners to their Virgingoddess Astarte.) The logical and irrepressible conclusion arising from the parallels brought forward, and the denunciation of the Missionary is this: The commands of the Brahmins to their element-gods not remaining" ineffectual," the power of the Brahmins is thus placed on a par with that of Jesus. Moreover, Astarte is shown not a whit weaker in potency than the "Virgin of the Sea" of Christian sailors. It is not enough to give a dog a bad name, and then hang him; the dog has to be proven guilty. Boreas and Astarte may be devils in theological

PRAYER IS OFTEN SORCERY.

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fancy, but, as just remarked, the tree has to be judged by its fruit. And once the Christians are shown as immoral and wicked as the pagans ever were, what benefit has humanity derived from its change of gods and idols?

That, however, which God and the Christian Saints are justified in doing, becomes a crime, if successful, in simple mortals. Sorcery and incantations are regarded as fables now; yet from the day of the Institutes of Justinian down to the laws against witchcraft of England and America —obsolete but not repealed to this day—such incantations, even when only suspected, were punished as criminal. Why punish a chimera? And still we read of Constantine, the Emperor, sentencing to death the philosopher Sopatrus for unchaining the winds, and thus preventing ships loaded with grain from arriving in time to put an end to famine. Pausanias, when affirming that he saw with his own eyes "men who by simple prayers and incantations" stopped a strong hail-storm, is derided. This does not prevent modern Christian writers from advising prayer during storm and danger, and believing in its efficacy. Hoppo and Stadleintwo magicians and sorcerers—were sentenced to death for throwing charms on fruit and transferring a harvest by magic arts from one field to another, hardly a century ago, if we can believe Sprenger, the famous writer, who vouches for it: "Qui frnges excantasscnt scgetcm pellicentcs in

cantando."

Let us close by reminding the reader that, without the smallest shadow of superstition, one may believe in the dual nature of every object on Earth—in the spiritual and the material, the visible and the invisible nature, and that science virtually proves this, while denying its own demonstration. For if, as Sir William Grove has it, the electricitv we handle is but the result of ordinary matter affected by something invisible, the "ultimate generating power" of every Force, the "one omnipresent influence," then it only becomes natural that one should believe as the ancients did; namely, that every Element is dual in its nature. "Ethereal fire is the emanation of the Kabir proper; the aerial is but the union (correlation) of the former with terrestrial fire, and its guidance and application on our earthly plane belongs to a Kabir of a lesser dignity"—an Elemental, perhaps, as an Occultist would call it; and the same may be said of every Cosmic Element.

No one will deny that the human being is possessed of various forces: magnetic, sympathetic, antipathetic, nervous, dynamical, occult, mechanical, mental—every kind of force; and that the physical forces are all biological in their essence, seeing that they intermingle with, and often merge into, those forces that we have named intellectual and moral—the first being the vehicles, so to say, the upadhi, of the second. No one, who does not deny soul in man, would hesitate in

saying that their presence and commingling are the very essence of our being; that they constitute the Ego in man, in fact. These potencies have their physiological, physical, mechanical, as well as their nervous, ecstatic, clairaudient, and clairvoyant phenomena, which are now regarded and recognised as perfectly natural, even by science. Why should man be the only exception in nature, and why cannot even the Elements have their vehicles, their "Vahans" in what we call the Physical Forces? And why, above all, should such beliefs be called "superstition" along with the religions of old?

§ XV.

ON KWAN-SHI-YIN AND KWAN-Y1N.

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LIKE Avalokiteshwara, Kwan-shi-yin has passed through several transformations, but it is an error to say of him that he is a modern invention of the Northern Buddhists, for under another appellation he has been known from the earliest times. The Secret Doctrine teaches that "He who is the first to appear at Renovation will be the last to come before Re-absorption (pralayal." Thus the logoi of all nations, from the Vedic Visvakarma of the Mysteries down to the Saviour of the present civilised nations, are the Word" who was "in the beginning" (or the reawakening of the energising powers of Nature) with the One ABSOLUTE. Born of Fire and Water, before these became distinct elements, It was the "Maker" (fashioner or modeller) of all things; "without him was not anything made that was made"; "in whom was life, and the life was the light of men"; and who finally may be called, as he ever has been, the Alpha and the Omega of manifested Nature. "The great Dragon of Wisdom is born of Fire and Water, and into Fire and Water will all be re-absorbed with him" (Fa-Hwa-King). As this Bodhisatva is said "to assume any form he pleases "from the beginning of a Manvantara to its end, though his special birthday (memorial day) is celebrated according to the Kin-kwang-ming-King (“Luminous Sutra of Golden Light") in the second month on the nineteenth day, and that of "Maitreya Buddha" in the first month on the first day, yet the two are one. He will appear as Maitreya Buddha, the last of the Avatars and Buddhas, in the seventh Race. This belief and expectation are universal throughout the East. Only it is not in the Kali yug, our present terrifically materialistic age of Darkness, the "Black Age," that a new Saviour of Humanity can ever appear. The Kali yug is

"l'Age d'Or" (!) only in the mystic writings of some French pseudoOccultists. (See "La Mission des Juifs.")

Hence the ritual in the exoteric worship of this deity was founded on magic. The Mantras are all taken from special books kept secret by the priests, and each is said to work a magical effect; as the reciter or reader produces, by simply chanting them, a secret causation which results in immediate effects. Kwan-Shi-Yin is Avalokiteshwara, and both are forms of the seventh Universal Principle; while in its highest metaphysical character this deity is the synthetic aggregation of all the planetary Spirits, Dhyani Chohans. He is the "Self-manifested;" in short, the "Son of the Father." Crowned with seven dragons, above his statue there appears the inscription Pu-Tsi-K'iun-ling, "the universal Saviour of all living beings."

Of course the name given in the archaic volume of the Stanzas is quite different, but Kwan-Yin is a perfect equivalent. In a temple of Pu'to, the sacred island of the Buddhists in China, Kwan-Shi-Yin is represented floating on a black aquatic bird (Kdla-Hansa), and pouring on the heads of mortals the elixir of life, which, as it flows, is transformed into one of the chief Dhyani-Buddhas—the Regent of a star called the "Star of Salvation." In his third transformation Kwan-Yin is the informing spirit or genius of Water. In China the Dalai-Lama is believed to be an incarnation of Kwan-Shi-Yin, who in his third terrestrial appearance was a Bodhisattva, while the Teshu Lama is an incarnation of Amitabha Buddha, or Gautama.

It may be remarked en passant that a writer must indeed have a diseased imagination to discover phallic worship everywhere, as do the authors of "China Revealed" (McClatchey) and "Phallicism." The first discovers "the old phallic gods, represented under two evident symbols. —the Khan or Yang, which is the membrum virile, and the Kwan or Yin, the pudendum muliebrc." (See "Phallicism, p. 273.) Such a rendering seems the more strange as Kwan-Shi-Yin (Avalokiteswara) and Kwan-Yin, besides being now the patron deities of the Buddhist ascetics, the Yogis of Thibet, are the gods of chastity, and are, in their esoteric meaning, not even that which is implied in the rendering of Mr. Rhys Davids' "Buddhism," (p. 202): "The name Avalokiteshwara . . means 'the Lord who looks down from on high.'" Nor is Kwan-Shi-Yin "the Spirit of the Buddhas present in the Church," but, literally interpreted, it means "the Lord that is seen," and in one sense, "the divine Self perceived by Self" (the human)—the Atman or seventh principle merged in the Universal, perceived by, or the object of perception to, Buddhi, the sixth principle or divine Soul in man. In a still higher sense, Avalokiteshwara KwanShi-Yin, referred to as the seventh Universal principle, is the Logos

perceived by the Universal Buddhi—or Soul, as the synthetic aggregate. of the Dhyani-Buddhas: and is not the " Spirit of Buddha present in the Church," but the omnipresent universal Spirit manifested in the temple of Kosmos or Nature. This Orientalistic etymology of Kwan and Yin is on a par with that of "Yogini," which, we are told by Mr. Hargrave Jennings, "is a Sanskrit word, in the dialects pronounced Yogi or Zogee (!), and is equivalent to Sena, and exactly the same as Duti or Duti-Ca'—i.e., a sacred prostitute of the temple, worshipped as Yoni or Sakti" (p. 60). "The books of morality," in India, "direct a faithful wife to shun the society of Yogini or females who have been adored as Sakti . . amongst the votaries of a most licentious description." Nothing should surprise us after this. And it is, therefore, with hardly a smile that we find another preposterous absurdity quoted about "Budh," as being a name "which signifies not only the sun as the source of generation but also the male organ (Round Towers of Ireland; quoted by Mr. Hargrave Jennings in "Phallicism," p. 264). Max Muller, in his "False Analogies," says that "the most celebrated Chinese scholar of his time, Abel Remusat," maintains "that the three syllables I Hi Wei (in the fourteenth chapter of the Tao-te-king) were meant for Je-ho-vah (Science of Religion, p. 332); and again, Father Amyot, who "feels certain that the three persons of the Trinity could be recognised" in the same work. And if Abel Remusat, why not Hargrave Jennings? Every scholar will recognise the absurdity of ever seeing in Budh, "the enlightened" and "the awakened," a "phallic symbol."

Kwan-shi-yin, then, is "the Son identical with his Father" mystically, or the Logos—the word. He is called the " Dragon of Wisdom " in Stanza III., as all the Logoi of all the ancient religious systems are connected with, and symbolised by, serpents. In old Egypt, the God Nahbkoon, "he who unites the doubles," (astral light re-uniting by its dual physiological and spiritual potency the divine human to its purely divine Monad, the prototype "in heaven" or Nature) was represented as a serpent on human legs, either with or without arms. It was the emblem of the resurrection of Nature, as also of Christ with the Ophites, and of Jehovah as the brazen serpent healing those who looked at him; the serpent being an emblem of Christ with the Templars also, (see the Templar degree in Masonry). The symbol of Knouph (Khoum also), or the soul of the world, says Champollion (Pantheon, text 3), " is represented among other forms under that of a huge serpent on human legs; this reptile, being the emblem of the good genius and the veritable Agathodæmon, is sometimes bearded." The sacred animal is thus identical with the serpent of the Ophites, and is figured on a great number of engraved stones, called Gnostic or Basilidean gems. This serpent appears with various heads (human and animal), but its gems

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