But there exists another book. None of its possessors regard it as very ancient, as it was born with, and is only as old as the Black Age, namely, about 5,000 years. In about nine years hence, the first cycle of the first five millenniums, that began with the great cycle of the Kali Yuga, will end. And then the last prophecy contained in that book-the first volume of the prophetic record for the Black Age-will be accomplished. (We have not long to wait, and many of us will witness the dawn of the New Cycle, at the end of which not a few accounts will be settled and squared between the races. Volume II of the prophecies is nearly ready, having been in preparation since the time of Buddha's grand successor, Shankarâchârya. One more important point must be noticed, one that stands foremost in the series of proofs given of the existence of one primeval, universal Wisdom-at any rate for Christian Kabalists and students. The teachings were, at least, partially known to several of the Fathers of the Church. It is maintained, on purely historical grounds, that Origen, Synesius, and even Clemens Alexandrinus, had themselves been initiated into the Mysteries before adding to the Neo-Platonism of the Alexandrian school that of the Gnostics, under the Christian veil. More than this, some of the doctrines of the secret schools, though by no means all, were preserved in the Vatican, and have since become part and parcel of the Mysteries, in the shape of disfigured additions made to the original Christian programme by the Latin Church. Such is the now materialised dogma of the Immaculate Conception. This accounts for the great persecutions set on foot by the Roman Catholic Church against Occultism, Masonry, and heterodox Mysticism generally. The days of Constantine were the last turning-point in history, the period of the supreme struggle, that ended in the Western world. throttling the old religions in favour of the new one, built on their bodies. From thence the vista into the far distant past, beyond the Deluge and the Garden of Eden, began to be forcibly and relentlessly shut out by every fair and unfair means from the indiscreet gaze of posterity. Every issue was blocked up, every record upon which hands could be laid, destroyed. Yet there remains enough, even among such mutilated records, to warrant us in saying that there is in them every requisite evidence of the actual existence of a Parent Doctrine. Fragments have survived geological and political cataclysms, to tell the story; and every survival shows evidence that the now secret Wisdom was once the one fountain head, the ever-flowing perennial source, า from which were fed all the streamlets-the later religions of all nations from the first down to the last. This period, beginning with Buddha and Pythagoras at the one end and finishing with the NeoPlatonists and Gnostics at the other, is the only focus left in History wherein converge for the last time the bright rays of light streaming from the æons of times gone by, unobscured by the hand of bigotry and fanaticism. This accounts for the necessity under which the writer has laboured of ever explaining the facts given from the hoariest past by evidence gathered from the historical period, even at the risk of being once more charged with a lack of method and system. No other means was at hand. The public must be made acquainted with the efforts of many world-adepts, of initiated poets and writers in the classics of every age, to preserve in the records of humanity the knowledge at least of the existence of such a philosophy, if not actually of its tenets. The Initiates of 1888 would indeed remain incomprehensible and even a seemingly impossible myth, were not like Initiates shown to have lived in every other age of history. This could be done only by naming chapter and verse where mention may be found of these great characters, who were preceded and followed by a long and interminable line of other famous antediluvian and posteluvian Masters in the arts. Thus only could it be shown, on semi-traditional and semi-historical authority, that occult knowledge and the powers it confers on man, are not altogether fictions, but that they are as old as the world itself. To my judges, past and future, therefore-whether they are serious literary critics, or those howling dervishes in literature who judge a book according to the popularity or unpopularity of the author's name, who, hardly glancing at its contents, fasten like lethal bacilli on the weakests points of the body-I have nothing to say. Nor shall I condescend to notice those crack-brained slanderers-fortunately very few in number-who, hoping to attract public attention by throwing discredit on every writer whose name is better known than their own, foam and bark at their very shadows. These, having first maintained for years that the doctrines taught in the Theosophist, and which culminated in Esoteric Buddhism, had beca all invented by the present writer, have finally turned round, and denounced Isis Unveiled and the rest as a plagiarism from Eliphas Lévi (!), Paracelsus (!!), and, mirabile dictu, Buddhism and Brahminism (!!!). As well charge Renan with having stolen his l'ie de Jésus from the Gospels, and Max Müller his Sacred Books of the East or his Chips from the philosophies of the Brâhmans and of Gautama, the Buddha. But to the public in general and the readers of THE SECRET DOCTRINE I may repeat what I have stated all along, and which I now clothe in the words of Montaigne: Gentlemen, "I have here made only a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the string that ties them." Pull the "string" to pieces and cut it up in shreds, if you will. As for the nosegay of facts—you will never be able to make away with these. You can only ignore them, and no more. We may close with a parting word concerning this first volume. In an introduction prefacing chapters dealing chiefly with cosmogony, certain subjects brought forward may be deemed out of place, but one more consideration added to those already given has led me to touch upon them. Every reader will inevitably judge the statements made from the stand-point of his own knowledge, experience, and consciousness, basing his judgment on what he has already learnt. This fact the writer is constantly obliged to bear in mind; hence, also the frequent references in this first volume to matters which, properly speaking, belong to a later part of the work, but which could not be passed by in silence, lest the reader should look upon it as a fairy tale indeed a fiction of some modern brain. Thus, the Past shall help to realize the Present, and the latter to better appreciate the Past. The errors of the day must be explained and swept away, yet it is more than probable-nay in the present case it amounts to certitude-that once more the testimony of long ages and of history will fail to impress any but the very intuitional-which is equal to saying the very few. But in this as in all like cases, the true and the faithful may console themselves by presenting the sceptical modern Sadducee with the mathematical proof and memorial of his obdurate obstinacy and bigotry. There still exists somewhere in the archives of the French Academy, the famous law of probabilities worked out by certain mathematicians for the benefit of sceptics by an algebraical process. It runs thus: If two persons give their evidence to a fact, and thus impart to it each of them of certitude; that fact will have then of certitude; i.e., its probability will bear to its improbability the ratio of 35 to 1. If three such evidences are joined together the certitude will become 215 1. The agreement of ten persons giving each of certitude will produce 1833, etc., etc. The Occultist 1023 1024 may remain satisfied with such certitude, and care for no more. PROEM. PAGES FROM A PRE-HISTORIC RECORD. AN archaic Manuscript-a collection of palm leaves made impermeable to water, fire, and air, by some specific and unknown process-is before the writer's eye. On the first page is an immaculate white disk within a dull black ground. On the following page, the same disk, but with a central point. The first, the student knows, represents Kosmos in Eternity, before the reawakening of still slumbering Energy, the Emanation of the World in later systems. The point in the hitherto immaculate disk, Space and Eternity in Pralaya, denotes the dawn of differentiation. It is the Point in the Mundane Egg, the Germ within it which will become the Universe, the All, the boundless, periodical Kosmos-a Germ which is latent and active, periodically and by turns. The one circle is divine Unity, from which all proceeds, whither all returns: its circumference-a forcibly limited symbol, in view of the limitation of the human mind-indicates the abstract, ever incognizable PRESENCE, and its plane, the Universal Soul, although the two are one. Only, the face of the disk being white, and the surrounding ground black, clearly shows that its plane is the sole knowledge, dim and hazy though it still is, that is attainable by man. It is on this plane that the manvantaric manifestations begin; for it is in this SOUL that slumbers, during the Pralaya, the Divine Thought, wherein lies. concealed the plan of every future cosmogony and theogony. It is hardly necessary to remind the reader that the term Divine Thought, like that of Universal Mind, must not be regarded as even vaguely shadowing forth an intellectual process akin to that exhibited by man. The "Unconscious," according to von Hartmann, arrived at the vast creative, or rather evolutionary plan, "by a clairvoyant wisdom superior to all consciousness," which in Vedantic language would mean absolute Wisdom. Only those who realize how far intuition soars above the tardy processes of ratiocinative thought can form the faintest conception of that absolute Wisdom which transcends the ideas of Time and Space. Mind, as we know it, is resolvable into states of consciousness, of varying duration, intensity, complexity, etc., all, in the ultimate, resting on sensation, which is again Mâyâ. Sensation, again, necessarily postulates limitation. The Personal God of orthodox Theism perceives, thinks, and is affected by emotion; he repents and feels "fierce anger." But the notion of such mental states clearly involves the unthinkable postulate of the externality of the exciting stimuli, to say nothing of the impossibility of ascribing changelessness to a being whose emotions fluctuate with events in the worlds he presides over. The conceptions of a Personal God as changeless and infinite are thus unpsychological and, what is worse, unphilosophical. |