Occult philosophy is the key to all divine obscurities, and the absolute queen of society in those ages when it was reserved exclusively for the education of priests and kings. The multitude never conspires except against real powers; it possesses not the knowledge of what is true, but it has the instinct of what is strong. Emperor Julian was the Don Quixote of Roman Chivalry. Julian and Socrates were put to death for the same crime. Why do priests and potentates tremble? What secret power threatens tiaras and crowns? Magic, as a science, is the knowledge of the metaphysical principles, and of the way by which the omniscience and omnipotence of the spirit and its control over nature’s forces may be acquired by the individual while still in the body. Magic, as an art, is the application of this knowledge in practice. True Magic is the intimate knowledge of nature within the sanctuaries known as the “worship of the Light” and diligent research into those occult laws, which constitute the ultimate essence of every element. True Magic, being divine and spiritual wisdom, it can only be exercised by the pure in heart. Occultism is vastly different from “magic,” a term often confounded the occult sciences, including the “black arts,” and the “worship of Darkness.” The Sphinx is the living palladium of humanity and the imagination lighting up our blind senses. She is the eternal enigma of the vulgar, the granite pedestal of Divine Wisdom, the voracious and silent monster whose invariable form expresses the one dogma of the great universal mystery. By lifting the veil of Isis and balancing the twin opposing powers — spirituality and animalism — ever reacting upon each other, the Kabbalah affirms the eternal struggle of being, reconciles reason with faith, power with liberty, and science with mystery. The seeker of Truth must be fearless and forgiving, brave dangers, dishonour, and give up all expectation. Divine knowledge must be conquered by defiant intensity and virtue, before she opens the portals of her secret chambers. Unsullied by the hand of matter, she shows her treasures only to the Eye of Spirit. What is faith except the audacity of a will, which does not tarry in darkness, but moves on towards the light in spite of all ordeals, surmounting all obstacles? It is action that proves life and establishes will, therefore, we must act in order to be. Mysteries are disdained by modern science. Their primary benefit is that they forestall absolute brutality among men. Miracles are natural phenomena from occult causes. Admission of miracles implies ignorance of their causes. By providential law, the true alchemist can only exercise omnipotence in inverse proportion to his material interests: the more resigned is he to privations, and the more he esteems that poverty which protects the secrets of the magnum opus, the more gold he makes. He must be cool, dispassionate, and utterly unconcerned with self, yet ever ready to sacrifice himself for the welfare of others. He has no right to use his magnetic power to lessen his personal suffering, as long as there is a single creature that suffers and whose physical or mental pain he can lessen, if not heal. Passion forcibly projects the astral light and impresses unforeseen and uncontrollable movements on the universal agent. The more we restrain ourselves for an idea, the greater is the strength we acquire within the scope of that idea. Indolence and forgetfulness are the enemies of will, and for this reason all religions have multiplied their observances and made their worship minute and difficult. In order to do a thing we must believe in the possibility of our doing it, and this confidence must forthwith be translated into acts. Faith does not even try; it begins with the certitude of completing and proceeds calmly, as if omnipotence were at its disposal and eternity before it. True magicians are normally found in rural areas, often uninstructed folks and simple shepherds. Those who live in harmony with nature are wiser than doctors, whose spiritual perception is trammelled by the sophistries of their schools. While poverty has no natural tendency to bring forth selfishness, wealth requires it. Hardship and poverty are so favourable to spiritual progress that the greatest masters have preferred it, even when the wealth of the world was at their disposal. In poverty is benevolence assayed, and in the moment of anger is a man’s truthfulness displayed. By truth alone is man’s mind purified, and by the right discipline it does become inspired. We should always remember that we are dethroned sovereigns who consent to existence in order to reconquer our crowns. Therefore, we must avoid hideous objects and uncomely persons, must decline eating with those whom we do not esteem, and must be mild and considerate to all. The disciple, by following his inner light, will never be found judging, and far less condemning those weaker than himself. The lamp of truth guides his learning, the mantle which enwraps him is his discretion, the staff is the emblem of his strength and daring. Let us then learn diligently; and when we know, let us have the will to act in unison with the Cosmic Will. He who has silenced lusts and fears is a king among the wandering mass. Fragments of relative truths can be communicated orally by the Sage to the disciple, but not the complete, everlasting Truth. Therefore Sages speak sparingly not to disclose but to lead the pure in heart to discover. Energetic ecclesiastical mediocrity has managed to supplant modest superiority, misunderstood because of its feigned modesty. A man who is truly man can only will that which he should reasonably and justly do; so does he silence lusts and fears, that he may hearken solely to reason. Such a man is a natural king and a shepherd for the wandering multitude. Life is aspiration and respiration. Creation is the assumption of a shadow to serve as a bound to light, of a void to serve as space for the plenitude, of a passive fructified principle to sustain and realise the power of the active generating principle. Movement is the outcome of a preponderance of one over the other force (positive and negative) as determined by the laws of affinity and antipathy. If both forces are absolutely and invariably equal, the world will come to a stand-still. “If the two forces are expanded and remain so long inactive, as to equal one another and so come to a complete rest, the condition is death.” Man can produce two breathings at his pleasure, one warm and the other cold; he can also project either the active or passive light at will. Will is the offspring of Divinity; desire, the motive power of animal life. Miracles are the inexplicable effects of natural causes. They are commonly regarded as contradictions of nature or sudden vagaries of the divine mind — not seeing that a single causeless effect would reduce the universe to chaos. Anthropomorphism is the parent of materialism and author of black magic. God operates by His works in heaven by angels, and on earth by men. But in the “heaven” of human conceptions, it is humanity that creates God, and men think that God has made them in His image because they have made Him in theirs. The man who has come to fear nothing and desire nothing is master of all. Nothing on earth can withstand the power of rational will. Warm breathing attracts, cold repels, for heat is positive electricity; cold, negative electricity. Warm insufflation restores the circulation of the blood, cures rheumatic and gouty pains, restores the balance of the humours, and dispels lassitude. Cold insufflation soothes pains occasioned by congestions and fluidic accumulations. Occult medicine is essentially sympathetic. Good will and reciprocal affection must exist between doctor and patient. Syrups and juleps have little inherent virtue. Rabelais compelled his patients to laugh, and all the remedies he subsequently gave them succeeded better, as a result; he established a magnetic sympathy between himself and them, by means of which he communicated to them his own confidence and good humour; he flattered them in his prefaces, called them his precious, most illustrious patients, and dedicated his books to them. The cause of every bodily disorder can be traced back to a moral disorder. But the power to heal is never possessed by those addicted to vicious indulgences. Only the pure in heart can heal the ills of the body by exercising divine gifts. Such only can give peace to the disturbed spirit of their brothers and sisters, for their power to heal come from no poisonous source.

First, the Atlantean Darkness had driven away the Kings of Light. Then, the Semites debauched the Holy of Holies. Every birth is an ever-recurring miracle, evidence that within the workshop of the womb an intelligent creative power has intervened to fasten a living soul to a physical machine. The metaphor of the Holy of Holies in sacred constructions was taken from the idea of the sacredness of the organs of generation, and carried to the extreme by the Churches. Vedic woman was as free as man, for no impure terrestrial thought was ever mixed with the religious symbology of the early Aryans. The seclusion of women in penetralia began with the Mohammedans, the next heirs to Hebrew symbolism after Christian ecclesiasticism. Aryan and Semitic religious systems of thought are two opposing poles: sincerity and spirituality versus concealment and animalism. Everything holy and precious has been so much defiled and desecrated, that the dark age we live in is now much darker. A quick overview of the Semitic theological predicament. The real serpent of Genesis is “the Lord God” himself, not the membrum virile. The serpent has always been an emblem of Wisdom and Eternity, the dual Androgyne or Agathodaimon, Light + Shadow coiled within a Grand Cycle, and manifesting as the opposing forces of Good and Evil — eternally reacting upon each other. Esoterically, serpent is Logos, the bearer of Divine Creative Wisdom that taught men to become creators in their turn. No sin could be attributed to the alleged “disobedience” of Adam and Eve in the bower of Eden. The only disobedience that incurs harsh punishment is contempt of the laws of spiritual life. Estrangement from the love of god and our neighbour will bring about spiritual death for personal immortality is conditional. There is no sin worse than suppression of Truth, and ingratitude to the ancient teachers of Occult Science. When the Kalki-Avatara appears men will be born again without sin, as the early Third Race Lemurians were. Our Saviours preferred free will to passive slavery, intellectual self-conscious pain and even torture to inane, imbecile, instinctual beatitude. But while saving man from mental darkness, they inflicted upon him the torment and tortures of unmastered self-consciousness, the outcome of his free will, besides every ill to which man and flesh are heir to. The key to understanding the “original sin,” and the redemption from sin, is the Promethean Sacrifice. Thus the boon of Prometheus became a curse, though foreknown and foreseen by the Divine Host (the Dhyani-Chohans of the Secret Doctrine) personified in that personage, as his name well shows. It is in this Promethean act that rests the cause of the “sin” and its redemption. The real sin is man’s passions and proclivities that chain his higher aspirations to the rock of matter, and bring forth the vulture of sorrow and pain that eats his insides. It is biblical allegories, such as the “fall,” “atonement,” and “crucifixion,” that led Western Humanity through roads knee-deep in blood. These allegories led people to believe in the dogma of an evil spirit distinct from the spirit of all-good, whereas the former lives in all-matter and pre-eminently in man. To cap it all, the Churches invented the God-slandering dogmas of hell and eternal perdition. By debasing number 7, the Jews made their religion rest solely on physiological symbols, thus deifying sexual Theogony and adoring the phallus. They were a remarkably matter-of-fact, unspiritual people at all times. They debauched the pure ideal of a wholly immaterial creation into an emblem of human reproduction and sexuality. The Hebrew Scriptures had been tampered with and remodelled, had been lost and rewritten a dozen times before the days of Ezra, who reconstructed the old lost Jewish Books to suit his own ambitions. From Genesis to the last word of Deuteronomy, the Pentateuch is the symbolical narrative of the sexes and an apotheosis of Phallicism under astronomical and physiological personations. The higher keys to the Archaic Wisdom-Religion that were once humanity’s common property are now obfuscated. No key to the universal language-system can ever open the mysteries of creation in a work in which, whether through design or carelessness, nearly every sentence has been made to apply to the latest outcome of religious views — to Phallicism, and to nothing else. Plato’s motto “God geometrizes” was accepted by both Aryans and Jews. But while the former applied their Science of Correspondences to veil the most spiritual and sublime truths of Nature, the latter used their acumen to conceal only one of the mysteries of evolution (to them the most divine), namely, that of birth and generation, and then idealised the male organ. While composing their national allegories, the Jews never had more than three keys out of seven — the astronomical, the numerical and, above all, the purely anthropological or rather physiological key. This resulted in the most phallic religion of all, and this has now passed, part and parcel, into Christian theology. Religious anthropolatry stimulated the exercise of black, left-hand magic, and overshadowed the Archaic Wisdom Religion, that of the “Sons of God,” the B’ne Elohim of old. This double sin led to the “Great War” and the “Great Flood” of Atlantis, and is the forerunner of worse calamities to come. Self-gratification and phallic-worship are the main causes of suffering in today’s world. An old, simple symbol of the Holy of Holies was a white tent. In Egyptian and Hebrew temples, it evolved into a four-colour curtain suspended from four pillars. Then the “Sanctuary” became the “Holy of Holies,” and the arcanum anthropomorphised, phallicised, sullied with indecency, and polluted by gross matter. For the Pantheists, the chaste sarcophagus embraced the periodical reawakenings of Cosmos, Nature, and Man to new objective existences. But the Jews, whose realism was as practical and gross in the days of Moses as it is now, viewed it differently. Their King David danced “uncovered” before the Ark of the Covenant, anxious to appear vile for the sake of his “Lord.” They even embellished the chaste Ark with two cherubs facing each other, and their wings spread in such a manner as to form a perfect yoni. Yet, in India, the Ark has always been symbolised by the golden cow; in Egypt, by the sarcophagus or female principle; and in Greece, by the crescent-form of the new Moon. The Holy Spirit is now surrounded by the unholy dancers of the “temple.” Ashtoreth-Astarte is a reflection of the Chaldean Nuah or Universal Mother, the female Noah. Then we have Belita or Tamtu (Chaldean for sea), the Mother of the City of Erech who became Eve, Mary (Latin for sea), the Virgin of the Latin Church standing on the crescent-moon and at times on the globe, to vary the program. Plenty of other variations of navis (Latin for ship, from Greek ναυς), the ship-like form of the crescent, which blends in itself all those common symbols of the ship of life, such as Noah’s Ark, the Yoni of the Hindus, and the Ark of the Covenant (i.e., the Universal “Mother of Gods”), are now found in every Christian Church as the nave (ablative case of navis). The mystic word Alm that Mohammed prefixed to many chapters of the Koran alludes to the Immaculate Virgin of the Supreme Heavens. It is from the same root that comes the word Almeh, the Egyptian dancing-girls, “virgins” of the same type as the Nachnis of India, and the female Qedoshim of the Jewish temples. Even IO, the pillar and circle, the first decimal number or Sun and Moon, was desecrated. Jehovah is the originator of measures, and of the British inch. He is merely a composite name for membrum virile and Eve, a hermaphrodite. Jehovah is in one sense Noah or, literally translated, inch! Jehovah and Moses is one more permutation. Still, the Holy of Holies is an international symbol. The worship of the “god in the ark” dates only from David; and for a thousand years Israel knew of no phallic Jehovah. Now the old Kabbalah, edited and re-edited, has become tainted with it. The passage through the “golden” cow in the same stooping position as the one shown in the gallery of the Pyramid of Cheops, identifies man with Jehovah in Hebrew esotericism. The difference lies in the spirit of interpretation. With the Hindus as with the ancient Egyptians, that Spirit was, and is, entirely metaphysical and psychological; with the Hebrews, realistic and physiological. With the ancient Aryan, the stooping man at the entrance of the Sanctum Sanctorum symbolises the virtuous man in his trial of life (Chrēstos in humiliation), who is about to pass through the matrix of Mother Nature in order to regain his former spiritual status, that of pre-natal Christos, the Divine Man. With the Semite, the same stooping man stands for the fall of Spirit into matter, apotheosized by dragging Deity down to the level of animal man. The Semite interpretations emanated from, and were pre-eminently those, of a small tribe — thus marking its national features and the idiosyncratic defects that characterize many of the Jews to this day: gross realism, selfishness, and sensuality. An abyss separates Hinduism from Christian Judaism. The religion of the Hindu detaches him from earth; The religion of the Jew, being a wise prudential feeling grounded on mere calculation, attaches him to earth. Built solely on phallic worship, Judaism has become a religion of hate and malice toward everyone and everything outside themselves. In Hinduism, the Holy of Holies is a universal abstraction, whose dramatis personæ are Infinite Spirit and Nature; in Christian Judaism, it is a personal God outside of Nature and the human womb, i.e., a phallic god and his image on earth, the man of flesh. Jehovah is simply a fancy and a perversion of the Holy Name. It is the Esoteric teachings and the Initiates of the Future, whose mission is, and will always be, to redeem and ennoble once more the primitive conception so sadly profaned by its crude and gross application to exoteric dogmas, and fanciful personations by theological and ecclesiastical religionists. The secret or esoteric worship of the Jews was the same Pantheism that the Vedantin philosophers are reproached with today; Jehovah was a substitute for purposes of an exoteric national faith, and had no importance or reality in the eyes of the erudite priests and philosophers. Jehovah can only be regarded as the creator of our globe and its heaven, namely, the firmament. A grotesque verse from Exodus kabbalistically interpreted by J. Ralston Skinner. The Semites seem to have had no other or higher purpose in life than that of procreating their species. They had no aspirations towards the Ideal. The real Holy of Holies is a ray of Absolute Truth. It is our innermost and highest Spiritual Consciousness. We should not blaspheme against It by ascribing to It our finite conceptions.

The original Kabbalah was entirely metaphysical; the later Kabbalah has suffocated the divine ideal under the heavy phallic element.

Fohat (Cosmic Electricity), by infusing energy into primordial matter, electrifies into life and scatters into atoms. It is through Fohat that the ideas of the Universal Mind are impressed upon matter. Occultism asserts that Electricity is Matter, not mere motion. Force, or Energy, may be better names for it. Electricity is “immaterial” only in the sense that its molecules are not subject to perception and experiment; yet, Occultism says it is atomic, therefore material. Fohat is connected with Vishnu, from the root vish, “to pervade,” therefore, he is called the Pervader and the Manufacture because he shapes the atoms from crude material. From the first awakening of Kosmos to a new Day of Brahmā or Motion, which even during the periods of Rest (Night) pulsates and thrills through every slumbering atom, assuming an ever-growing tendency to circular movement. The gyratory movement of atoms and spheres exists from eternity. The Elementary Germs with which Fohat fills the Universe from the “Heaven of Mind,” are the atoms of Science and the monads of Leibniz. A perpetual exchange of atoms is taking place in Space, thus changing their combining equivalents on every planet. Atoms enter into new forms of existence, undreamt of, and incognisable to, physical Science. The essence of cometary matter, for instance, is totally different from any of the chemical or physical characteristics with which the greatest chemists and physicists of the earth are familiar with. Enshrined in its pristine state within the bosom of the Eternal Mother, every atom born beyond the threshold of her realm is doomed to incessant differentiation. If we follow the atoms and molecules of the lower plane in their transformation upwards, these will come to a point where they pass altogether beyond the range of our faculties. As the spiritual Monad is One, Universal, Boundless and Impartite, whose rays form what we, in our ignorance, call the “Individual Monads” of men, so the Mineral Monad — being at the opposite point of the circle — is also One, and from it proceed the countless physical atoms, which Science is beginning to regard as individualized. Instead of saying a Mineral Monad, the more correct phraseology in physical science which differentiates every atom would have been to call it the Monad manifesting in that form of Prakriti called the Mineral Kingdom. The atom, as represented in the ordinary scientific hypothesis, is not a particle of something, animated by a psychic something, destined after aions to blossom as a man. It is a concrete manifestation of the Universal Energy which itself has not yet become individualized, i.e., a sequential manifestation of the One Universal Monad. As the monads are uncompounded things, it is the spiritual essence which vivifies them in their degrees of differentiation, which properly constitutes the Monad — not the atomic aggregation, which is only the vehicle and the substance through which thrill the lower and the higher degrees of Intelligence. Every form on earth and in Space strives towards self-formation following the model placed for it in the “Heavenly Man.” The atom’s evolution and involution, its external and internal growth and development, have all one and the same object — Man or Humanity at large. Not only the chemical compounds are the same, but the same infinitesimal invisible lives compose the atoms of the bodies of the mountain and the daisy, of man and the ant, of the elephant and of the tree which shelters him from the sun. Each particle, whether organic or inorganic, is a life. Each atom may reach, by “self-induced and self-devised efforts,” that plane where it re-becomes the One Unconditioned All. Starting upon the long journey immaculate; descending more and more into sinful matter, and having connected himself with every atom in manifested space — the Pilgrim, having struggled through and suffered in every form of life and being, is only at the bottom of the valley of matter, and half through his cycle, when he has identified himself with Humanity at large. This, he has made in his own image. Myths are now proved to be fables, just in proportion as we misunderstand them; truths, in proportion as they were once understood. The Ether of Science, the Ilus of Berosus, the Protyle of Sir William Crookes, are one the same, primordial matter out of which the “Builders,” following the plan traced out for them in the Divine Thought, fashion the systems in Cosmos. Such grand metaphysical concepts can no longer be brushed aside as myths. Materialism and the malignancy of Scepticism are two evils that must remain in the world as long as man has not quitted his present gross form to don the one he had during the first and second Root-Races of this Round. The atom of the chemist, the atom of the physicist, that of the mathematician, and that of the metaphysician, have absolutely nothing in common but the name! Each lower mind constructs an atom to suit his own fancy, in order to explain some special phenomenon with which he is particularly concerned. The primordial Atom belongs wholly to the domain of metaphysics. It is an entified abstraction and has nought to do with physics, strictly speaking, as it can never be brought to the test of retort or balance. The whole Universe focuses on a single metaphysical point. Atoms, Ether, and the Evolution itself of modern Science are based on the conceptions of archaic nations. “Conceptions” for the profane, under the shape of allegories; plain truths taught during the Initiations of the Elect. Force is not in the Atom: it is in the space which separates atoms from each other. Matter exists in two conditions, latent or undifferentiated, and patent or differentiated. Atomic, however, is a substance not subject to the qualities of matter, from which it is quite different. The Matter of the Esoteric Doctrine is eternal because it is Unevolved Cause. Eternal Matter becomes atomic only periodically. In the language of the Initiates, Atoms are Souls and Intelligences. The atom imagined by modern Science, now called “energy,” is inseparable from Spirit. Stones, minerals, rocks, and even chemical atoms are simply organic units in profound lethargy. Their coma comes to an end when their inertia becomes activity. Replace the chemical terms molecule, atom, particle, etc., by the words Hosts, Monads, Devas, etc., and one might think the genesis of gods, the primeval evolution of manvantaric Intelligent Forces, was being described. Were Leibniz’ and Spinoza’s systems to be reconciled, the essence of Esoteric Philosophy would be made to appear. From the shock of the two, as opposed to the Cartesian system, emerge the Truths of the Archaic Doctrine and the Spirit which is at the heart of the Occult Doctrine and Thought. Though both admitted but one real Entity, while Spinoza made it impersonal and indivisible, Leibniz divided his personal Deity into a number of divine and semi-divine Beings. Spinoza was a subjective, Leibniz an objective Pantheist, yet both were great philosophers in their intuitive perceptions. To the follower of the true Eastern Archaic Wisdom, to him who worships in spirit nought outside the Absolute Unity, that ever-pulsating great Heart that beats throughout, as in every atom of nature, each such atom contains the germ from which he may raise the Tree of Knowledge, whose fruits will give life eternal and not physical life alone. Spirit is abstract light, uncreated, latent in every atom, in whose profound and sacred repose all motion must cease for ever. Latent Electricity becomes patent under certain conditions. The “elementary atoms” are compound bodies that contain primordial globules, the gross encasement of the still finer atom-spark — the spark of Life and source of Electricity — which is matter, still. When the Life-energy is active in the atom, that atom is organic; when dormant or latent, “inorganic.” The distinction between the two states is arbitrary and spurious. Life is as much present in the inorganic as in the organic matter. Matter, in atomizing, differentiates. Restore the differentiated matter to the status quo ante, and there is no difficulty in seeing how it can pass through the interstices of dense substance in its differentiated state, as we easily conceive of the travel of electricity and other forces through their conductors. There are no “blind” forces in nature. Every atom in the universe is permeated with Universal Intelligence, from the latent spark in the mineral up to the quasi-divine light in man’s brain. Matter and force are ever allied. Matter without force, and force without matter, are inconceivable. Every atom is endowed with consciousness, yet the potential of man’s ability to control the cells and atoms of his body, have not been honoured with the imprimatur of the popes of modern science. Every atom is a little universe of its own. Every cell and organ in the human body has a brain and memory of its own, and thus also, experience and discriminative powers. Physical Science calls “atoms” that which the Occultists regard as particles or molecules. The real atoms are the inner principles and the intelligent, spiritual guides of the cells, and the particles they inform. Atom is not the smallest constituent unit of matter, not even a mathematical point. It is an immutable Entity, a reality within an appearance — the molecule being in Occult Philosophy but a figment of maya-illusion. It may be described as a compact or crystallized point of Divine Energy and Ideation. The Hermetic Divine Fire is the fons et origo of life, that Uncreated Spirit which starts from, and is immediately reabsorbed into primordial matter. It is the ultimate essence of every atom whether pertaining to animate or inanimate, organic or inorganic substance. Before that Spirit is immersed into matter, it is self-existent and independent of matter. The real Atom does not exist on the material plane, it is beyond space and time. Atom, in its eternal state, is invisible even to the eye of an Archangel. Brahmā is called Atom, because we have to imagine it as a mathematical point which, however, can be extended to Absoluteness. He who would be an occultist must not separate either himself or anything else from the rest of creation or non-creation. For, the moment he distinguishes himself from even a vessel of dishonour, he will not be able to join himself to any vessel of honour. He must think of himself as an infinitesimal something, not even as an individual atom, but as a part of the world-atoms as a whole — or become an illusion, a nobody, and vanish like a breath leaving no trace behind.

Selfishness, envy, revenge, and malice are mankind’s deadliest curses. Selfishness is love misdirected to, and jealously kept for one’s little self at the expense of his Spiritual Self and of all other selves, who are transient rays of One Universal Self. Selfishness and ambition are mankind’s deadliest curses. Great intellect and too much knowledge is a two-edged weapon in life, and instruments for evil, as well as for good. When combined with Selfishness, they will make of the whole of Humanity a footstool for the elevation of him who possesses them, and a means for the attainment of his objects; while, applied to altruistic and humanitarian purposes, they may become the means of salvation of the many. Pride and Presumption, the two chief prompters of Selfishness and Egotism, are the causes that emptied heaven of one third of its divine dwellers (mystically) and of another third, of the stars (astronomically). The first statement is an allegory intimately connected with humanity; the second, a fact. Our age is criminal in its frightful selfishness, in its scepticism which grimaces at the very idea of anything beyond the material, and in its idiotic indifference to all that does not pertain to the personal self — more than any of the past ages of ignorant barbarism and intellectual darkness. The paths are many but Wisdom is One. Artistic souls envision it, those who suffer dream of it, the pure in heart know it. Only light and empty heads, egotistical and vain drones, confused by their own buzzing, will remain ignorant of the supreme ideal. They will continue existing until life becomes a grievous burden to them. Pride and conceit are the two malignant cancers devouring the heart of “civilized” nations. Selfishness is the sword of Damocles dangling by evanescent personality over the golden thread that links it with its Spiritual Centre and Life Eternal. One never ceases to be astonished by the egoism, vanity, and “self-sufficiency” of the majority. There are some for whom their little personality constitutes the whole universe. The vices and illusions of lower minds are typical of egotistical mediocrities. Overfed by the sweet delicacies of ambition and personal life, man accumulates gravitas. Kipling says that he is gathering “too much ego in his cosmos.” His “little personality constitutes the whole universe,” says Madame Blavatsky. Every veil of illusion that creates a sense of personal isolation, a feeling of separateness from All, must be torn asunder; and those who, through vanity and selfishness, go against the Divine Plan, cannot but incur the punishment of total annihilation. Life on earth is the result and consequence of that unseen, yet ever present autocrat and despot, called Selfishness and Egotism. The strongest will becomes impotent before the voice and authority of this self-appointed commander. Selfish is the life of a hermit, useless to all, and as useless to himself. “Self-culture” is for the solitary Hatha Yogis who shun the society of their fellow men. Pampering the animal self is triply distilled selfishness. The Hindu Yogi, who isolates himself in an impenetrable forest, and the Christian hermit who retires to the desert, are both accomplished egoists. The one seeks refuge in Nirvana, the other to save his soul from hell. Philosophical pantheism is based upon the correct understanding of the mysteries of being. Modern pessimism is yet another system of evil added by unhealthy fancy to an ever-growing sum of social evils, and a systematic slander of sentient life. Neither good nor evil would exist were it not for the light they throw upon each other. The bundle of Egotism disappears after death, as the costume of the part he played disappears from the actor’s body after he leaves the theatre at the end of the play and goes to bed. The slightest tinge of Selfishness precludes the employment of Spiritual Forces. For, unless the intention is entirely unalloyed, the spiritual will transform itself into the psychic, act on the astral plane, and dire results may be produced by it. The powers and forces of animal nature can equally be used by the selfish and revengeful, as by the unselfish and the all-forgiving. But the powers and forces of spirit lend themselves only to the pure in heart — and this is Divine Magic. The greatest crime that was ever perpetrated upon mankind was committed on that day when the first priest invented the first prayer with a selfish object in view. Prayer is an ennobling action when it is an intense feeling, an ardent desire rushing forth from our very heart for the good of other people, and when entirely detached from any selfish personal object; the craving for “the wilds beyond the heavens” is natural and holy in man, but on the condition of sharing that bliss with others. The heart of the purely selfish man, who cares not if all others rot so he can have pleasure in their pain, is softened for those near and dear to him — his family, relatives, and friends. His affections may even extend to religious fanaticism and even patriotic fervour in his country’s wars and political schemes, in the hope of recognition and reward. However sincere and ardent the faith of a theist, unless, while conforming his life to what he pleases to term “divine laws,” he gives precedence in his thoughts, first to the benefit that accrues from such a moral course of actions to his brother, and then only thinks of himself — he will remain a pious egotist. For belief in and fear of God will develop and grow in exact proportion to his Selfishness, his fear of punishment and bad results only for himself, without the least concern for his brother. Theism and atheism grow and develop together our reasoning powers, and become either fortified or weakened by reflection or deduction of evidence. The only God which Theosophists worship is Truth. The only devil they recognize and which they fight with unabated fury is the Satan of Egotism and unbridled passions. Alone our Western religion stands in its isolation, as a monument of the most gigantic human selfishness ever evolved by human brain, without one word in favour of, or for the protection of, the poor animal. Selfishness, envy, revenge, and malice are the hallmarks of sorcerers. The Roman Catholic “fathers” and clergy, particularly when pursuing their selfish objectives collectively, they have to be ranked among the adepts of the Black Art. In the crypts of the cyclopean Stonehenge in England, and its twin-brother Carnac of Brittany, curious scenes are taking place whenever there is a new convert in view. Stupefying is the power of blind faith in, and veneration of, ecclesiastical teachings. The conscience of the Roman Catholic priest is most likely at peace. He works personally for no selfish purpose, but with the object of “saving a soul” from “eternal damnation.” In his view, if Magic there be in it, it is holy, meritorious, and divine Magic. Whenever those priest-hypnotists want to control an individual, selected by them for conversion, they retire to an underground place, consecrated by them for such purposes and there, forming a circle, throw their combined will-power in the direction of that individual. This is the kind of ceremonial Magic and sorcery practiced at Stonehenge and elsewhere. The modern Symbologist is exceedingly clever only at detecting phallic worship and sexual emblems, even where none were ever meant. But for the true student of Occult Lore, White or Divine Magic could no more exist in Nature without its counterpart Black Magic, than day without night, whether these be of twelve hours or of six months’ duration. Magic is still in full sway amidst mankind, however blind the latter to its silent presence and pernicious influence, however ignorant society may be of its beneficent and maleficent effects. Most of those magicians are sorcerers by reason of their inherent selfishness, their revengeful natures, their envy, and malice. Man accumulates knowledge, invents religions and philosophies, but he himself remains still the same. In his ceaseless chase after wealth and honours and the will-o’-the-wisps of novelty, enjoyment, and ambition, man is ever moved by one chief motor — Vain Selfishness. We live in an era of the most triumphant display of human genius. But what good has all this great civilization and progress done to the millions in the world’s slums, and to the armies of the “great unwashed”? Selfishness is the chief prompter of our age and the boisterous rebel against Nature’s decrees. The student, at the very outset, learns that the alpha and the omega of life is selflessness, and knows that only in the sanctuary of merit and self-forgetfulness can the true meaning of life reveal itself to his eager heart. By sinking his consciousness deep into his heart he can reach that holy place, only when alone in silence and darkness. When the need for silence has grown great enough, he will turn to seek it even in the midst of the struggle with self, and he will find it. Living for self alone is full of pain and sorrow; living for others is full of divine bliss and joy for ever, free from bonds tied by mortal hands. There is no danger to him who is true and sincere, and especially unselfish. For he is thus prepared to meet any temptation. The pure at heart, who study with a view of perfecting themselves, need not have any fear; but rather those who make of the Sacred Science a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. Conscience, God’s vicegerent in the soul, speaks no longer in man when the whispers of the still small voice within are stifled by the ever-increasing din and roar of selfishness. Space and time should be given to the self-appointed censors of morality to cleanse themselves of the ferocious selfishness, narrow-mindedness, and conceit which have made their playing at “the higher life” an almost comical travesty. It is that fierce and unashamed personal selfishness, the chief motor in the “struggle for life,” that is the sole cause of human starvation, and it’s vastly more powerful extension — national egoism and vanity — which stirs up wealthy nations and individuals to bury enormous capitals in the unproductive erection of gorgeous churches and temples, and to support a swarm of social drones called Cardinals and Bishops, who parasitize their subordinates and their flocks. Compassion felt but not acted upon is not altruism, it is bare hypocrisy. Spiritual perfection and knowledge can only be reached on the spiritual plane — in that state in which all sense of separateness, all selfishness, all feeling of personal interest and desire, has been merged in the wider consciousness of the humanity at large. No blind submission to the commands of another can be demanded, or would not be of any use. Each individual must learn for himself, through trial and suffering, to discriminate what is beneficial to humanity; and in proportion, as he begins transmuting his materiality to spirituality — lead to gold — his mind will open to receive the guidance of his Immortal Self within. and best friend of the mortal self. Impersonality is the ultimate aim of cosmic evolution. We have to work along with Nature, and not place ourselves in opposition to her inherent impulse, which must ultimately assert itself. To oppose it, must necessitate suffering, since a weaker force, in its egotism, tries to array itself against the mighty Universal Law. Whenever Truth is veiled for the many, it is unveiled for the few. Men had not created evil yet in those hoary days of bliss and purity, for they were more Godlike than human. When Selfishness was born out of desires and passions hitherto unknown, and superhuman knowledge and power were abused, it became necessary to limit the number of those who knew. Thus arose Initiation. The need of veiling Truth to protect it from desecration becoming more apparent with every generation, the thin veil used at first had to be gradually thickened according to the spread of I-ness and Me-ness, Luxury and Lust — and this led to the Mysteries. Our age is pre-eminently materialistic and pietistic. Our literature, our modern thought, and the so-called progress, run on these two parallel lines, so incongruously dissimilar, and yet both so popular and so very orthodox, each in its own way. He who presumes to draw a third line, as a hyphen of reconciliation between the two, has to be fully prepared for the worst. Compassion felt but not acted upon is not altruism, it is mere hypocrisy. Real self-development on esoteric lines requires action. The only way of sacrificing oneself “to the eternal” is by attuning to the collective spirit of life, embodied in and represented in its highest divine aspect by humanity alone. Vice and wickedness are an abnormal, unnatural manifestation, at this period of our human evolution. The fact that mankind was never more selfish and vicious than it is now — civilized nations having succeeded in making of the first an ethical characteristic, and of the second an art — is proof of the of the sorry state we are all in today. The Immortal Titan and True Philanthropist is moved by Compassion-Sacrifice; the mortal man, by Selfishness and Self-adoration in every instance. If man by suppressing, if not destroying, his selfishness and personality, only succeeds in knowing himself as he truly is, he will soon stand beyond all pain and misery, and beyond all the wear and tear of change, which is the chief originator of pain. Such a man will be physically of matter, he will move surrounded by matter, and yet he will live beyond and outside it. His body will be subject to change, but he himself will be entirely above it, and will experience everlasting life even while in temporary bodies of a short span. Happiness cannot exist as long as Egotism reigns supreme, and intellectual progress refuses to accept a subordinate position to ethical progress. And as long as Egotism will not give way to the Altruism, happiness will remain a Utopia. Listen to the voice of the Master: Your motive, being selfish, can only generate a double effect, good and bad, and will either nullify your good action, or turn it to another man’s profit. There is no happiness for one who is ever thinking of his little self and forgetting all other selves.

Genesis is a purely symbolic and kabbalistic volume. It can neither be understood nor appreciated, if judged by the mistranslations and misinterpretations of its Christian remodellers. The Sevenfold Primordial Evolution of the Puranas appear in the Bible as “Six Days of Creation,” and a seventh “day” of rest! None of these “creations” has ever occurred on this globe, wherever else they may have taken place. Esoterically speaking, Crocodile or Capricornus is Makaram, the Sanskrit name of the tenth sign. The shape of a crocodile or crab is the outcome of the stargazer's fertile imagination, and nothing more. Adam is the symbol of the first terrestrial man, or humanity at large. The man of clay was the first living being to appear on earth, the animal kingdom coming after him. And, as the Egyptian ram-headed god makes man on the potter’s wheel, so in Genesis do the Elohim fashion him out of the same material. The Adept can select any of the countless archetypal forms concealed in Divine Thought (Ideal World) and, by the power of his will, gather into its boundaries the matter required to make it visible to our sensible world — a miracle to the Christian, a fraud for the materialist. It is sound that produces colour, not the other way around. Our earth is densely populated by countless “viewless races,” the elemental evolutionary forces of nature below the mineral kingdom. The elemental cannot understand the thought of a person; it can only be reached when the exact scale of being, to which the elemental belongs, is vibrated by sound, colour, or form. By correlating the vibrations of sound, colour, form, number, and substance, the Adept rules over and commands the elemental forces that underlie the phenomena of nature. The evolution of the spiritual falling into the physical (from mineral, plant, and animal, up to man) takes place only during the First Round. At the middle of the Fourth Round, when the downward evolution turns upward (from physical to spiritual) man appears before anything else on earth. The vegetation that covered the earth in those days of hoary antiquity, belonging to the Third Round, was ethereal (transparent), and so was the first man (humanity), because he was a shadow (image) of his progenitors. The matter composing the objects we see and touch, continually returns to its pre-primordial condition of purity and light, which no mortal eye can see or bear its radiance.

The sevenfold primordial evolution of the Puranas appear in the Bible as “Six Days of Creation.” None of all these creations has ever occurred on this globe, wherever else they may have taken place.

A distinctive feature of Philaletheians’ compilations is that headings (and side captions, when available) function as subtitles: when read sequentially, they impart the salient points of the entire compilation. The value of this feature becomes apparent in long and complex analyses, where Contents double as Train of Thoughts. In this book pages 2-4 provide an overview of the main points as well as the syllogism of propositions and further elaborations.