copied was not of pure Jewish blood, and thus recognised no Jehovah ; nor did he worship any planetary god beside his own "Father," whom he knew, and with whom he communed as every high initiate does, "Spirit to Spirit and Soul to Soul." This can hardly be taken exception to, unless the critic explains to every one's satisfaction the strange sentences put in the mouth of Jesus by the author of the Fourth Gospel (chapter viii.) during his disputes with the Pharisees.

"I know ye are Abraham's seed . . . I speak the things which I have seen with my Father; and ye do the things which ye heard from your Father. . . . . Ye do the works of your Father. . . . . Ye are of your Father, the Devil. . . . . He was a murderer from the beginning, and stood not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When one speaketh a lie he speaketh of his own; for his father also is a liar and the father thereof," etc., etc.

That "Father" of the Pharisees was Jehovah, because identical with Cain, Saturn, Vulcan, etc.—the planet under which they were born, and the God whom they worshipped. Evidently there must be an occult meaning sought in these words and admonitions, however mistranslated, since they are pronounced by one who threatened with hell-fire anyone who says simply raca (fool) to his brother (Matthew v., 22). And evidently, again, the planets are not merely spheres, twinkling in Space, and made to shine for no purpose, but the domains of various beings with whom the profane are so far unacquainted; nevertheless, having a mysterious, unbroken, and powerful connection with men and globes. Every heavenly body is the temple of a god, and these gods themselves are the temples of God, the Unknown "Not Spirit." There is nothing profane in the Universe. All Nature is a consecrated place, as Young says:—

"Each of these Stars is a religious house."

....

Thus can all exoteric religions be shown the falsified copies of the esoteric teaching. It is the priesthood which has to be held responsible for the reaction in favour of materialism of our day. It is by worshiping and enforcing on the the masses the worship of the shells— personified for purposes of allegory—of pagan ideals, that the latest exoteric religion has made of Western lands a Pandemonium, in which the higher classes worship the golden calf, and the lower and ignorant masses are made to worship an idol with feet of clay.

Abraham and Saturn are identical) in astro-symbology, and he is the forefather of the Jehovistic Jews.

ANTIQUITY OUR GREAT MASTER.

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XII.

ANCIENT THOUGHT IN MODERN DRESS.

Modern Science is ancient thought distorted, and no more. We have seen, however, what intuitional scientists think, and are busy about; and now the reader may be given a few more proofs of the fact that more than one F.R.S. is unconsciously approaching the derided Secret Sciences.

With regard to cosmogony and primeval matter, modern speculations are undeniably ancient thought, improved by contradictory theories of recent origin. But the whole foundation belongs to Grecian and Indian Archaic astronomy and physics, in those days always called philosophy. In all the Aryan and Greek speculations, one meets with the conception of an all-pervading, unorganized, and homogeneous matter, or Chaos, re-named by modern scientists "Nebular condition of the world-stuff." What Anaxagoras called "Chaos" in his Homoiomeria is now called "primitive fluid" by Sir W. Thomson. The Hindu and Greek Atomists—Kanada, Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, etc., etc., are now reflected as in a clear mirror, in the supporters of the atomic theory of our modern days, beginning with Leibnitz's Monads, and ending with the "Vortical Atoms" of Sir W. Thomson.* True, the corpuscular theory of old is rejected, and the undulatory theory has taken its place. But the question is, whether the latter is so firmly established as not to be liable to be dethroned as was its predecessor? Light from its metaphysical aspect was fully treated of in "Isis Unveiled" :—

"Light is the first begotten, and the first emanation of the Supreme, and Light is Life, says the Evangelist and the Kabalist. Both are electricity —the life principle, the anima mundi, pervading the universe, the electric vivifier of all things. Light is the great Protean magician, and under the divine will of the architect,✝ or rather the architects, the "Builders" (called One collectively), its multifarious, omnipotent waves gave birth to every form as well as to every living being. From its swelling electric bosom, spring matter and spirit. Within its beams lie the beginnings of all physical and chemical action, and of all cosmic and spiritual phenomena; it vitalizes and disorganizes; it gives life and produces death, and from its primordial point gradually emerged into existence the myriads of worlds, visible and invisible celestial bodies. It was at the ray of this First mother, one in three, that "God," according to

The Elemental Vortices inaugurated by the Mind have not been improved by their modern transformation.

✝ I have been often taken to task for using expressions in Isis denoting belief in a personal and anthropomorphic God. This is not my idea. Kabalistically speaking, the "Architect "is the generic name for the Sephiroth, the Builders of the Universe, as the "Universal Mind " represents the collectivity of the Dhyan Chohanic Minds.

Plato, lighted a fire which we now call the sun,' " and which is not the cause of either light or heat, but merely the focus, or, as we might say, the lens, by which the rays of the primordial light become materialised, are concentrated upon our Solar System, and produce all the correlations of forces."

This is the Ether, as just explained in the views of Metcalfe, repeated. by Dr. Richardson, save the submission of the former to some details of the modern undulatory theory. We do not say that we deny the theory, but assert only that it needs completion and re-arrangement. But the Occultists are by no means the only heretics in this respect; for Mr. Robert Hunt, F.R.S., remarks, in his Researches on Light in its Chemical Relations, that:—

... .

"the undulatory theory does not account for the results of his experiments. Sir David Brewster, in his Treatise on Optics, showing that the colours of vegetable life arise. . . . from a specific attraction which the particles of these bodies exercise over the differently-coloured rays of light,1 and that it is by the light of the sun that the coloured juices of plants are elaborated, that the colours of bodies are changed, etc. . . . . ' remarks that it is not easy to allow 'that such effects can be produced by the mere vibration of an ethereal medium.' And he is forced, he says, 'by this class of facts, to reason as if light was material (?).' Professor Josiah P. Cooke, of Harvard University, says that he 'cannot agree . . . . with those who regard the wave-theory of light as an established principle of science.'! Herschell's doctrine, that the intensity of light, in effect of each undulation, 'is inversely as the square of the distance from the luminous body,' if correct, damages a good deal, if it does not kill the undulatory theory. That he is right, was proved repeatedly by experimentswith photometers; and though it begins to be much doubted, the undulatory theory is still alive." ("Isis Unveiled.")

To this remark of Sir W. Brewster—"forced to reason as if light was material"—there is a good deal to reply. Light, in one sense, is certainly as material as electricity itself is. And if electricity is not material, if it is only "a mode of motion," how is it that it can be stored up in Faure's accumulators? Helmholtz says that electricity must be as atomic as matter; and Mr. W. Crookes, F.R.S., supported the view in his address to the Chemical Section of the British Association, of which he was President (at Birmingham, 1886). This is what Helmholtz says (in his Faraday Lectures, 1881):—

"If we accept the hypothesis that the elementary substances are composed of atoms, we cannot avoid concluding that electricity also, positive as well as negative, is divided into definite elementary portions, which behave like atoms of electricity."

Here we have to repeat that which was already said in Section IX. there is but one science that can henceforth direct modern research into the one path which will lead to the discovery of the whole, hitherto

A CHASE AFTER THE PRIMAL MATTER.

581

occult, truth, and it is the youngest of all—chemistry, as it now stands reformed. There is no other, not excluding astronomy, that can so unerringly guide scientific intuition, as chemistry can. Two proofs of it are to be found in the world of Science—two great chemists, each among the greatest in his own country, and these are Mr. Crookes and the late Professor Butlerof: one, a thorough believer in abnormal phenomena; the other, as fervid a Spiritualist as he was great in natural Sciences. It becomes evident that while pondering over the ultimate divisibility of matter, and in the hitherto fruitless chase after the element of negative atomic weight, the scientifically trained mind of the chemist must feel irresistibly drawn towards those ever-shrouded worlds, to the mysterious beyond, whose measureless depths seem to close against the approach of the too materialistic hand that would fain draw aside its weil. "It is the unknown and the ever unhnowable," warns the MonistAgnostic. Not so; answers the persevering chemist :—"We are on the track and are not daunted, and fain would we enter the mysterious region which ignorance tichets unhnown."*

A few lines at the very close of his lecture on the Genesis of the Elements—two or three sentences—showed the eminent Scientist to be on the royal road to the greatest discoveries. He has been overshadowing for some time "the original protyle," and came to the conclusion that "he who grasps the Key will be permitted to unlock some of the deepest mysteries of creation." The protyle, as that great chemist explains :—

". . . is a word analogous to protoplasm, to express the idea of the original primal matter existing before the evolution of the chemical elements. The word I have ventured to use for this purpose is compounded of pb (earlier than) and ŋ (the stuff of which things are made). The word is scarcely a new coinage, for 600 years ago Roger Bacon wrote in his Arte Chymiac, "The elements are made out of "ŋ and every element is converted into the nature of another element."

The Knowledge of Roger Bacon did not come to this wonderful old magicianf by inspiration, but because he studied ancient works on

Mr. Crookes' "Presidential Address" at Birmingham. "There is but one unknown—the ultimate substratum of Spirit (Space). That which is not the Absolute and the One is, in virtue of that very differentiation, however far removed from the physical senses, always accessible to the spiritual human mind, which is a coruscation of the undifferentiable Integral."—(Practical Lessons on the Occult.)

+ Thus, what the writer of the present work said ten years ago in "Isis Unveiled' (Vol. I.) was prophetic, it seems. These are the words: Many of these mystics, by following what they were taught by some treatises, secretly preserved from one generation to another, achieved discoveries which would not be despised even in our modern days of exact sciences. Roger Bacon, the friar, was laughed at as a quack, and is now generally numbered among 'pretenders' to magic art; but his discoveries were nevertheless accepted, and are now used by those who ridicule him the most. Roger Bacon belonged by right, if not by fact, to that Brotherhood which includes all those who

magic and alchemy, having a key to the real meaning of words. But see what Mr. Crookes says of protyle, next neighbour to the unconscious. Mulaprakriti of the Occultists:

ence.

"Let us start at the moment when the first element came into exist. Before this time, matter, as we know it, was not. It is equally impossible to conceive of matter without energy, as of energy without matter; from one point of view both are convertible terms. Before the birth of atoms, all those forms of energy, which become evident when matter acts upon matter,. I could not have existed"—they were locked up in the protyle as latent potenti. alities only. Coincident with the creation of atoms, all those attributes and! properties, which form the means of discriminating one chemical element from another, start into existence fully endowed with energy." (Presidential Address,. p. 16.)

66

With every respect due to the great knowledge of the lecturer, the Occultist would put it otherwise. They would say that no atom is ever created," for the atoms are eternal within the bosom of the One Atom," the atom of atoms "—viewed during Manvantara as the JagadYoni the material causative womb of the world. Pradhana (unmodified matter), that which is the first form of Prakriti, or material visible, as well as invisible nature, and Purusha, spirit, are eternally one; and they are Nirnpadhi, (without adventitious qualities or attributes) only during Pralaya, and when beyond any of the planes of consciousness of existence. The atom, as known to modern science, is inseparable from Purusha, which is spirit, but is now called "Energy" in Science. The protyle atom has not been comminuted or subtilized: it has simply passed into that plane, which is no plane, but the eternal state of everything beyond the planes of illusion. Both Purusha and Pradhana are immutable and unconsumable, or Aparinamin and Avyaya, in eternity; and both during the Mayavic periods may be referred to as Vyaya and Parindmin, or that which can expand, pass away and disappear, and is "modifiable." In this sense Purusha, must of course, be held distinct in our conceptions. iTom Parabrahmam. Nevertheless that, which is called "energy" or "force" in Science and has been explained as a dual Force by Metcalfe, is never, in fact, and cannot be energy alone; for it is the substance of the world, its soul, the all-permeant "Sarvaga," in conjunction with Kala "time." The three are the trinity in one, during Manvantara, the all-potential Unity, which acts on the plane of illusion (Maya) as three distinct things. In Orphic

study the occult sciences. Living in the thirteenth century, almost a contemporary, therefore, of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, his discoveries-such as gunpowder and optical glasses, and his mechanical achievements-were considered by everyone as so many miracles. He was accused of having made a compact with the Evil One."

Just so; those forms of energy . . . which become evident . . ." in the laboratory of the chemist and physicist; but there are other forms of energy wedded to other forms of matter, which are sufersensuous, yet known to the adepts.