66 103 but little, would have killed such comparatively small "Houses" as Mercury, Venus and Mars. As Uranus was not known before the end of the eighteenth century, the name of the fourth planet mentioned in the allegory must remain to us, so far, a mystery. The Breath" of all the "seven" is said to be Bhâskara (lightmaking), because they (the planets) were all comets and suns in their origin. They evolve into Manvantaric life from primæval Chaos (now the noumenon of irresolvable nebula) by aggregation and accumulation of the primary differentiations of the eternal matter, according to the beautiful expression in the Commentary, "Thus the Sons of Light clothed themselves in the fabric of Darkness." They are called allegorically" the Heavenly Snails," on account of their (to us) formless Intelligences inhabiting unseen their starry and planetary homes, and, so to speak, carrying them as the snails do along with themselves in their revolution. The doctrine of a common origin for all the heavenly bodies and planets, was, as we see, inculcated by the Archaic astronomers, before Kepler, Newton, Leibnitz, Kant, Herschel and Laplace. Heat (the Breath), attraction and repulsion—the three great factors of Motion—are the conditions under which all the members of all this primitive family are born, developed, and die, to be reborn after a "Night of Brahma," during which eternal matter relapses periodically into its primary undifferentiated state. The most attenuated gases can give no idea of its nature to the modern physicist. Centres of Forces at first, the invisible sparks of primordial atoms differentiate into molecules, and become Suns—passing gradually into objectivity— gaseous, radiant, cosmic, the one "Whirlwind" (or motion) finally giving the impulse to the form, and the initial motion, regulated and sustained by the never-resting Breaths—the Dhyan Chohans. 6. PRODUCED BY THE STANZA IV.—Continued. THEN THE SECOND SEVEN, WHO ARE THE LIPIKA, Son is One, The "SoN-SuNs" Are Countless. The Lipi-ka, from the word lipi, "writing," means literally the "Scribes." Mystically, these Divine Beings are connected with Karma, the Law of Retribution, for they are the Recorders or Annalists who impress on the (to us) invisible tablets of the Astral Light, "the great picture-gallery of eternity"--a faithful record of every act, and even thought, of man, of all that was, is, or ever will be, in the phenomenal Universe. As said in "Isis," this divine and unseen canvas is the Book Of Life. As it is the Lipika who project into objectivity from the passive Universal Mind the ideal plan of the universe, upon which the "Builders" reconstruct the Kosmos after every Pralaya, it is they who stand parallel to the Seven Angels of the Presence, whom the Christians recognise in the Seven "Planetary Spirits " or the "Spirits of the Stars;" for thus it is they who are the direct amanuenses of the Eternal Ideation—or, as called by Plato, the "Divine Thought." The Eternal Record is no fantastic dream, for we meet with the same records in the world of gross matter. "A shadow never falls upon a wall without leaving thereupon a permanent trace which might be made visible by resorting to proper processes," says Dr. Draper. "The portraits of our friends or landscapeviews may be hidden on the sensitive surface from the eye, but they are ready to make their appearance as soon as proper developers are resorted to. A spectre is concealed on a silver or a glassy surface, until, by our necromancy, we make it come forth into the visible world. Upon the walls of our most private apartments, where we think the eye of intrusion is altogether shut out, and our retirement can never be profaned, there exist the vestiges of all our acts, silhouettes of whatever we have done." Drs. Jevons and Babbage believe that every thought, displacing the particles of the brain and setting them in motion, scatters them throughout the Universe, and they think that "each particle of the existing matter must be a register of all that has happened." (Principles of Science, Vol. II. p. 455.) Thus the ancient doctrine has begun to acquire rights of citizenship in the speculations of the scientific world. The forty "Assessors" who stand in the region of Amenti as the accusers of the Soul before Osiris, belong to the same class of deities as the Lipika, and might stand paralleled, were not the Egyptian gods so * These are the four "Immortals" which are mentioned in Atharva Veda as the Watchers or Guardians of the four quarters of the sky (see ch. lxxvi., 1-4, et seq.). "Conflict between Religion and Science."-Draper, pp. 132 and 133. THE DIVINE RECORDERS. 105 little understood in their esoteric meaning. The Hindu Chitra-Gnpta who reads out the account of every Soul's life from his register, called Agra-Sandhani; the "Assessors" who read theirs from the heart of the defunct, which becomes an open hook before (whether) Yama, Minos, Osiris, or Karma—are all so many copies of, and variants from the Lipika, and their Astral Records. Nevertheless, the Lipi-ka are not deities connected with Death, but with Life Eternal. Connected as the Lipika are with the destiny of every man and the birth of every child, whose life is already traced in the Astral Light— not fatalistically, but only because the future, like the Past, is ever alive in the Present—they may also be said to exercise an influence on the Science of Horoscopy. We must admit the truth of the latter whether we will or not. For, as observed by one of the modern adepts of Astrology, "Now that photography has revealed to us the chemical influence of the Sidereal system, by fixing on the sensitized plate of the apparatus milliards of stars and planets that had hitherto baffled the efforts of the most powerful telescopes to discover them, it becomes easier to understand how our solar system can, at the birth of a child, influence his brain—virgin of any impression—in a definite manner and according to the presence on the zenith of such or another zodiacal constellation."t t Les Mysteres de l'Horoscope, p. XI. STANZA V. i. THE PRIMORDIAL SEVEN, THE FIRST SEVEN BREATHS OF THE DRAGON OF WISDOM, PRODUCE IN THEIR TURN FROM THEIR HOLY CIRCUMGYRATING BREATHS THE FIERY WHIRLWIND (a). COMMENTARY. (a) This is, perhaps, the most difficult of all the Stanzas to explain. Its language is comprehensible only to him who is thoroughly versed in Eastern allegory and its purposely obscure phraseology. The question will surely be asked, “Do the Occultists believe in all these Builders," 6 Lipika,' and Sons of Light' as Entities, or are they merely imageries?" To this the answer is given as plainly: "After due allowance for the imagery of personified Powers, we must admit the existence of these Entities, if we would not reject the existence of spiritual humanity within physical mankind. For the hosts of these Sons of Light and 'Mind-born Sons' of the first manifested Ray of the Unknown All, are the very root of spiritual man." Unless we want to believe the unphilosophical dogma of a specially created soul for every human birth—a fresh supply of these pouring in daily, since Adam"—we have to admit the occult teachings. This will be explained in its place. Let us see, now, what may be the occult meaning of this Stanza. 66 The Doctrine teaches that, in order to become a divine, fully conscious god, aye, even the highest—the Spiritual primeval Intelligences must pass through the human stage. And when we say human, this does not apply merely to our terrestrial humanity, but to the mortals that inhabit any world, i.e., to those Intelligences that have reached the appropriate equilibrium between matter and spirit, as we have now, since the middle point of the Fourth Root Race of the Fourth Round was passed. Each Entity must have won for itself the right of becoming divine, through self-experience. Hegel, the great German thinker, must have known or sensed intuitionally this truth when saying, as he did, that the Unconscious evolved the Universe only "in the hope of attaining clear self-consciousness," of becoming, in other words, MAN; for this is also the secret meaning of the usual Puranic phrase about Brahma being constantly "moved by the desire to create." This explains also the hidden Kabalistic meaning of the saying: "The Breath becomes a stone; the stone, a plant; the plant, an animal; the animal, a man; the man, a spirit; and the spirit, a god." The Mind-born Sons, the Rishis, the Builders, etc., were all men—of whatever forms and shapes—in other worlds and the preceding Manvantaras. This subject, being so very mystical, is therefore the most difficult to explain in all its details and bearings; since the whole. mystery of evolutionary creation is contained in it. A sentence or two in it vividly recalls to mind similar ones in the Kabala and the phraseology of the King Psalmist (civ.), as both, when speaking of God, show him making the wind his messenger and his "ministers a flaming fire." But in the Esoteric doctrine it is used figuratively. The fiery Wind" is the incandescent Cosmic dust which only follows. magnetically, as the iron filings follow the magnet, the directing thought of the "Creative Forces." Yet, this cosmic dust is something more; for every atom in the Universe has the potentiality of self-consciousness in it, and is, like the Monads of Leibnitz, a Universe in itself, and for itself. It is an atom and an angel. " In this connection it should be noted that one of the luminaries of the modern Evolutionist School, Mr. A. R. Wallace, when discussing the inadequacy of "natural selection" as the sole factor in the development of physical man, practically concedes the whole point here discussed. He holds that the evolution of man was directed and furthered by superior Intelligences, whose agency is a necessary factor in the scheme of Nature. But once the operation of these Intelligences is admitted in one place, it is only a logical deduction to extend it still further. No hard and fast line can be drawn. STANZA V.—Continued. 2. They Make Of Him The Messenger Of Their Will (a). The Dzyu BECOMES FOHAT; THE SwiFT Son OF THE DlVlNE SoNS, WHOSE SONS ARE THE LlPIKA," RUNS CIRCULAR ERRANDS. He IS THE STEED, AND * The difference between the "Builders," the Planetary Spirits, and the Lipika must not be lost sight of. (See Nos. 5 and 6 of this Commentary.) |
