When a Solitary Ray from the Infinite One is about to become the Many, Duality interposes between It and Its finite differentiations. In the mayavic worlds of being everything is dual. Even the Divine Logos manifests as a double principle of Good and Evil. In terms of human evolution, the seeds of White and Black Magic were sown in Atlantis. Though perfected in materiality, Atlanteans degenerated in spirituality. Black magic, bestiality, selfishness, and self-adoration spelled their demise. Magic is arcane knowledge of the subjective side of Universe and Man, and of the Occult laws and powers that govern their objective manifestations. Arcane science misused, is Sorcery; wisely applied, True Magic. Black Magic is the predictable outcome of selfish motives. For it is the motive, and the motive alone, which makes any exercise of power become black, malignant, or white, beneficent Magic. Practical Theosophy is the modern term for old Magic. Metaphorically speaking, Magic is the conscious reunion of Psyche with Cupid, her beloved groom, upon her return to their celestial abode, or the re-integration of Thought and Spirit. This is the mystery that sanctifies marriage and every earnest hope for a better life. Thus true Magic is the marriage of Nous (Atma-Buddhi) with Manas, a union where Will and Thought, separated at the beginning of time, become One again when self-consciousness reaches the summit of divine power and inner knowledge. When man was first created he couldn’t commit any sin, for he was mindless and therefore irresponsible. The only “vice of his origin” was not his: it has been committed by those who refused to fire him with self-consciousness, with its inherent freedom of thought, and personal responsibility borne by informed decisions. Gnosis is the Western term for the mysteries and destiny of our being, both White and Black. A metaphor for the same enigma is Resurrection or the Raja-Yoga of Eastern Occultists. Amongst Neoplatonists, Raja-Yoga is known as Theurgy. Gnosis will either crown the pure with the sovereignty of their own spirit, or crush the opportunist in the darkness of ignorance and earthy passions. Theosophy is the keynote of our relationship with and in Divine Magic. For Magic is the study and application of divine law. Magic is the ancient Persian word for knowledge and embraces all Chaldeans sciences. It is proficiency in Nature’s hidden powers and laws, or Secret Wisdom, as it was taught in the sanctuaries of the Old World. Magic is the Maha, Magi or Maginsi of Medes and the Egyptians, and the Meghiston of the Zoroastrians. Ancient Magic is Secret Wisdom, the very opposite of Diabolism. It is the theurgy of Iamblichus, the gnosis of Pythagoras, the ecstasy of the Philaletheians, the summit of Eastern Philosophy and Ethics. Magic or Practical Occultism, is the object of Yoga. Mesmerism is another key to our inner nature. It is the Gupta-Vidya of the Eastern Occultists, excellence in universal philosophy, and pinnacle of human knowledge. As Truth is One, so the method for attaining It must be also one. Its disciples help each other in their lessons. The Witches of Thessaly are still amongst us. But as Magic differs from Sorcery, so the Magician differs from the Witch. Hypnotism is Black Magic, irrespective of whether conscious or unconscious. There is little difference between Voodoos and the Vivisectionists of our age. Therefore, Western practitioners of the Black Arts should not have the punishment and reputation without the profits and enjoyments they may get therefrom. Selfish initiates, lured by the glamour of power, retrogress inexorably, and curses always come home to roost. There are “Brothers of the Light” and “Brothers of the Shadow,” there are genuine seers and passive mediums, there are High Planetary Spirits and their illusionary appearances on the psychic screen of mediumistic perceptions. There is White Tantric Magic and its tainted counterpart, there is Neoplatonic Theurgia and its opposite number, Goëtia. Christians beware! The New Testament is all about Unselfishness and Spirituality. The Old Testament is a manual of Selfishness and Psychism. At the apex of its development, our Race will branch off to initiated Adepts, “Sons of Light,” and natural-born mediums, or “Sons of Darkness” — the latter to be exterminated by fire when time expires. We live in dangerous times. There are scores of unconscious crimes committed and many innocent people punished. Terror, tremor and dreadful incidences, as well as beauty, peace, and inspiration are “true presentiments of what lies in the bosom of the future, and much of which is already born.” Practical Theosophy is fraught with dangers for dabblers and neophytes alike. No one should go into occultism or even touch it before he is perfectly acquainted with his own powers. For, it’s all too easy to fall into Black Magic. Even a deed of kindness done with partiality may become evil, by stirring up animosity in the mind of others.

Works of fiction are no fiction, but presentiments of what lies in the bosom of the future. Many will be the unconscious crimes committed, and many will be the victims who will innocently suffer death at the hands of the righteous judges and the too innocent jurymen, both alike ignorant of the fiendish power of suggestion. The body may be slain but not the soul. The consequences of the death penalty for judge and jury, the community at large. and not the least for the criminal, are too grim and too harsh to contemplate. Capital punishment is futile, unnecessary, and fraught with potentially dire societal harms. While the seed of a tree may be destroyed, the spiritual “seed” which produces the soul of a man cannot be destroyed by capital punishment, but will eventually produce such a man again as sure as the seed of a thistle will produce nothing else but a thistle. One’s criminal powers and proclivities cannot be eliminated by killing his body. Having been deprived of one instrument for their manifestation, such powers will manifest themselves in other, still less convenient, and more dangerous ways. Moreover, by deferring the manifestation of an evil cause we pass on to a future generation an evil inheritance, with which we ourselves ought to have contended, and which we ought to have sought to ameliorate. Mortal man is an instrument of immortal spirit. A ray of divine mind dwells in the heart of every man. But the divine mind is veiled in man; his animal brain alone philosophises. The physical man is the musical instrument; the divine the performing artist. The physical body is a transient mask of the spiritual man within, and instrument of action on the objective plane. By the power of an inequitable law the slayer’s knife did stab himself, thus the unjust judge has lost his own defender. Letter to “Lucifer” from a puzzled student. Like an eye-for-an-eye, capital punishment is nothing but a relic of Jewish barbarity. As the juryman, in deciding for a verdict of guilty, becomes an accessory in a fresh murder, so an increasing number of people refuse to repay evil for evil.

The choice between good and evil can be traced to a particular phase of the evolution of human life on earth, when the Sons of Mahat quickened the mind of animal man, and reason succumbed to the temptation of personal desires. Having informed history, legend and language will now confirm archaic custom and practice. We heard of golden and silver days, and of primeval innocence unstained. The early Lemurian men, of the sweat-born Third Root-Race, were mindless hence sinless. Old Greece had two Apollos: the Hyperborean, a personification of the Sun (whose birthday is December), and the Southern Apollo. Ulysses, an Atlantean hero, must have been a profligate in the opinion of the pastoral Cyclopes. His adventure with the three “one-eyed” giants stands for the gradual passage of humanity from the Lemurian civilization of stone and colossal buildings in the North, to the sensual and physical culture of the Atlanteans in the South, which finally caused the last three subraces of his progenitors to lose their Spiritual Eye. The other allegory, that of Apollo “killing” the Cyclopes to avenge the death of his son Asklepios-Soter (Mercury, esoterically) does not refer to the Lemurian subraces but to the Hyperborean Arimaspian Cyclopes, the last Lemurian subrace endowed with the Wisdom Eye. Apollo, the God of Seers, whose duty it is to punish desecration, “killed” them with shafts representing human passions — fiery and lethal. The Hyperborean Continent, home of the Second Root-Race, extended beyond Boreas, the frozen-hearted god of snow storms and hurricanes. Nocturnal shadows never fell upon it and knew no winter in those early days, for it was the land of Gods and the favourite abode of Apollo and his beloved priests. Greenland was part of the Hyperborean Continent and had an almost tropical climate. It was the blessed land of eternal light and summer. At the close of the Third Root-Race spring reigned over the whole globe which was not subject, like our own, to the vicissitudes of seasons and the abrupt changes of temperature. But when the fatal hour struck, its ever-blooming lands were transformed into an underwater Hades. Lemuria and most of its people perished in the first great throe of evolution and consolidation of the globe. The other submerged landmass was Atlantis, a large group of continents and islands. Asia issued from under the waters after the sinking of Atlantis. Africa surfaced later, and Europe much later. The Hyperborean Continent and its people are symbolised by Latona. The golden apples carried away by Hercules were not in Libya but in Hyperborean Atlantis. The Greeks naturalised all the gods they borrowed from India and made Hellenes of them. Accountable, endowed with moral sense, with sapience of right and wrong endowed. Then the Watcher descended on earth and reigned over the Lemurian men. Under the silent guidance of this Wondrous Being, the pupils of the incarnated Rishis and Devas of the Third Root-Race handed their knowledge from one generation to another. Endowed with divine powers, man felt he was god in his inner self, though still an animal in his physical self. The struggle between the two began from the very day they tasted of the fruit of the “Tree of Wisdom.” Those who conquered their lower principles, by obtaining mastery over the body, joined the “Sons of Light.” Those who fell victims to their lower nature became the slaves of matter. The Golden Age, when the old gods walked the earth and mixed freely with mortals, was brought to an end by the Atlanteans, the womb-born heirs to the Lemurians: they adored themselves, cursed the Sun, worshipped the phallus, and thus became the new gods on earth. And when the old Lemurians ascended toward the Northern Pole, the Hyperborean Heaven of their Divine Progenitors, the new Atlanteans descended toward the Southern Pole, the “pit,” cosmically and terrestrially, and abode of Cosmic Elementals. This is the origin of the dual and triple nature in man, and of the good and evil in our world. Every man is now responsible and therefore accountable for his thoughts and actions. A firm grasp of Esoteric Anthropogenesis will help us better understand our divine ancestry, our privileged position in the universe, the meaning and purpose of life on earth, and our shared destiny. Atlantis was a landmass of an indefinite size. It contained two countries and two “cities” or races, the Northern and the Equatorial: the former was inhabited by a pious, meditative race; the latter by a fighting, warrior race.

Theosophy and Jesuitism are two opposite poles: one far above, the other far below even that stagnant marsh. One is the power of Light, the other that of Darkness. Theosophists are slandered and reviled by the Jesuits and their adherents everywhere. Roman Catholicism is but a name. As a Church it is a phantom of the past and a mask. The Jesuits have practised Black Magic in its worst form, far more than any other body of men; and to it they owe in large measure their power and influence. The day may come when their wealth will be violently taken from them, and they themselves mercilessly destroyed amidst the general execrations and applause of all nations and peoples. There is a Nemesis-Karma, though often it allows Evil and Sin to go on successfully for ages.

Materialism is the offspring of theological and dogmatic anthropomorphism. Every nation made a god of its own and, in its great ignorance and superstition, served, and flattered, and tried to propitiate that god. There can be no conscious meeting in Kama-loka, hence no grief. We meet those we loved only in Devachan, that subjective world of perfect bliss, which succeeds the Kama-loka. Kama-loka may be compared to the dressing-room of an actor, in which he divests himself of the costume of the last part he played before rebecoming himself properly. Once we realize that form is merely a temporary perception dependent on our physical senses and the idiosyncrasies of our physical brain, and has no existence on its own, then this illusion that formless cause cannot be causative of forms will soon vanish. Virtuous living alone, if uninformed by esoteric philosophy and unillumined by divine wisdom, cannot lead to friendship and interior communion with God. John Stuart Mill was a case of a wonderful development of the intellectual and terrestrial side of psyche or soul, but Spirit he rejected as all Agnostics do.