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Elementals
by
H P Blavatsky
I
THE Universal
Ęther was not, in the eyes of the ancients, simply a tenantless something, stretching
throughout the expanse of heaven; it was for them a boundless ocean, peopled
like our familiar earthly seas, with Gods, Planetary Spirits, monstrous and
minor creatures, and having in its every molecule the germs of life from the
potential up to the most developed. Like the finny tribes
which swarm
in our oceans and familiar bodies of water, each kind having its habitat in
some spot to which it is curiously adapted, some friendly, and some inimical to
man, some pleasant and some frightful to behold, some seeking the refuge of
quiet nooks and land-locked harbours, and some traversing great areas of water;
so the various races of the Planetary, Elemental, and other Spirits, were
believed by them to inhabit the different portions of the great ethereal ocean,
and to be exactly adapted to their respective conditions.
According to
the ancient doctrines, every member of this varied ethereal population, from
the highest "Gods" down to the soulless Elementals, was evolved by
the ceaseless motion inherent in the astral light. Light is force, and the
latter is produced by the will. As this will proceeds from an intelligence
which cannot err, for it is absolute and immutable and has nothing of the
material
organs of
human thought in it, being the superfine pure emanation of the ONE LIFE itself,
it proceeds from the beginning of time, according to immutable
laws, to
evolve the elementary fabric requisite for subsequent generations of what we
term human races. All of the latter, whether belonging to this planet or to
some other of the myriads in space, have their earthly bodies evolved in this
matrix out of the bodies of a certain class of these elemental beings--the
primordial germ of Gods and men--which have passed away into the visible
worlds.
In the Ancient
Philosophy there was no missing link to be supplied by what Tyndall calls an
"educated imagination"; no hiatus to be filled with volumes of
materialistic speculations made necessary by the absurd attempt to solve an
equation with
but one set of quantities; our "ignorant" ancestors traced the law of
evolution throughout the whole universe. As by gradual progression from the
star-cloudlet to the development of the physical body of man, the rule holds
good, so from the Universal Ęther to the incarnate human spirit, they traced
one
uninterrupted
series of entities. These evolutions were from the world of Spirit into the
world of gross Matter: and through that back again to the source of all things.
The "descent of species" was to them a descent from the Spirit,
primal source of all, to the "degradation of Matter."
In this
complete chain of unfoldings the elementary, spiritual beings had as distinct a
place, midway between the extremes, as Mr. Darwin's missing-link between the
ape and man.
No author in
the world of literature ever gave a more truthful or more poetical description
of these beings than Sir E. Bulwer-Lytton, the author of Zanoni. Now, himself
"a thing not of matter" but an "idea of joy and light," his
words sound more like the faithful echo of memory than the exuberant outflow of
mere imagination.
He makes the
wise Mejnour say to Glyndon:
Man is
arrogant in proportion of his ignorance. For several ages he saw in the
countless worlds that sparkle through space like the bubbles of a shoreless
ocean, only the petty candles . . . that Providence has been pleased to light
for no other purpose but to make the night more agreeable to man. . . .
Astronomy has
corrected this delusion of human vanity, and man now reluctantly confesses that
the stars are worlds, larger and more glorious than his own. .
. .
Everywhere, in this immense design, science brings new life to light. . .
. Reasoning,
then, by evident analogy, if not a leaf, if not a drop of water, but is, no less
than yonder star, a habitable and breathing world--nay, if even man himself is
a world to other lives, and millions and myriads dwell in the rivers of his
blood, and inhabit man's frame, as man inhabits earth--common sense (if our
schoolmen had it) would suffice to teach that the circumfluent infinite which
you call space--the boundless impalpable which divides earth from the moon and
stars--is filled also with its correspondent and appropriate life.
Is it not a
visible absurdity to suppose that being is
crowded upon
every leaf, and yet absent from the immensities of space! The law of the great
system forbids the waste even of an atom; it knows no spot where something of
life does not breathe. . . . Well, then, can you conceive that space, which is
the infinite itself, is alone a waste, is alone lifeless, is less useful to the
one design of universal being . . . than the peopled leaf, than the swarming
globule? The microscope shows you the creatures on the leaf; no mechanical tube
is yet invented to discover the nobler and more gifted things that hover in the
illimitable air. Yet between these last and man is a mysterious and terrible
affinity. . . . But first, to penetrate this barrier, the soul with which you
listen must be sharpened by intense enthusiasm, purified from all earthly
desires. . . . When thus prepared, science can be brought to aid it; the sight
itself may be rendered more subtile, the nerves more acute, the spirit more
alive and outward, and the element itself--the air, the space--may be made, by
certain secrets of the higher chemistry, more palpable and clear. And this,
too, is not Magic as the credulous call it; as I have so often said before,
Magic (a science that violates Nature) exists not; it is but the science by
which Nature can be controlled. Now, in space there are millions of beings, not
literally spiritual, for they have all, like the animalculę unseen by the naked
eye, certain forms of matter, though matter so delicate, air-drawn, and
subtile, that it is, as it were, but a film, a gossamer, that clothes the
spirit. . . . Yet, in truth, these races differ most widely . . . some of
surpassing wisdom, some of horrible malignity; some hostile as fiends to men,
others gentle as messengers between earth and heaven.1 Such is the insufficient
sketch of Elemental Beings void of Divine Spirit, given by one whom many with
reason believed to know more than he was prepared to admit in the face of an
incredulous public. We have underlined the few lines than which nothing can be
more graphically descriptive. An Initiate, having a personal knowledge of these
creatures, could do no better.
We may pass
now to the "Gods," or Daimons, of the ancient Egyptians and Greeks,
and from these to the Devas and Pitris of the still more ancient Hindū Āryans.
Who or what were the Gods, or Daimonia, of the Greeks and Romans?
The name has
since then been monopolized and disfigured to their own use by the Christian
Fathers. Ever following in the footsteps of old Pagan Philosophers on the
well-trodden highway of their speculations, while, as ever, trying to pass
these off as new tracks on virgin soil, and themselves as the first pioneers in
a hitherto pathless forest of eternal truths--they repeated the Zoroastrian
ruse: to make a clean sweep of all the Hindū Gods and Deities, Zoroaster had
called them all Devs, and adopted the name as designating only evil powers. So
did the Christian Fathers. They applied the sacred name of Daimonia--the divine
Egos of man--to their devils, a fiction of diseased brains, and thus
dishonoured the anthropomorphized symbols of the natural sciences of wise
antiquity, and made them all loathesome in the sight of the ignorant and the
unlearned.
What the Gods
and Daimonia, or Daimons, really were, we may learn from Socrates, Plato, Plutarch,
and many other renowned Sages and Philosophers of pre-Christian, as well as
post-Christian days. We will give some of their views.
Xenocrates,
who expounded many of the unwritten theories and teachings of his master, and
who surpassed Plato in his definition of the doctrine of invisible magnitudes,
taught that the Daimons are intermediate beings between the divine perfection
and human sinfulness,2 and he divides them into classes, each subdivided into
many others. But he states expressly that the individual or personal Soul is
the leading guardian Daimon of every man, and that no Daimon has more power
over us than our own. Thus the Daimonion of Socrates is the God or Divine
Entity which inspired him all his life. It depends on man either to open or
close his perceptions to the Divine voice.
Heracleides,
who adopted fully the Pythagorean and Platonic views of the human Soul, its
nature and faculties, speaking of Spirits, calls them "Daimons with airy
and vaporous bodies," and affirms that Souls inhabit the Milky Way before
descending "into generation" or sublunary
existence.
Again, when
the author of Epinomis locates between the highest and lowest Gods (embodied
Souls) three classes of Daimons, and peoples the universe with invisible
beings, he is more rational than either our modern Scientists, who make between
the two extremes one vast hiatus of being, the playground of blind forces, or
the Christian Theologians, who call every pagan God, a dęmon, or devil. Of
these three classes the first two are invisible; their bodies are pure ether
and fire (Planetary Spirits); the Daimons of the third class are clothed with
vapoury bodies; they are usually invisible, but sometimes, making themselves
concrete, become visible for a few seconds. These are the earthly spirits, or
our astral souls.
The fact is,
that the word Daimon was given by the ancients, and especially by the
Philosophers of the Alexandrian school, to all kinds of spirits, whether good
or bad, human or otherwise, but the appellation was often synonymous with that
of Gods or angels. For instance, the"Samothraces" was a designation
of the Fane-gods; worshipped at Samothracia in the Mysteries. They are
considered as identical with the Cabeiri, Dioscuri, and Corybantes. Their names
were mystical--denoting Pluto, Ceres or Proserpina, Bacchus, and Ęsculapius or
Hermes, and they were all referred to as Daimons. Apuleius, speaking in the
same symbolical and veiled language, of the two Souls, the human and the
divine, says:
The human
soul is a demon that our language may name genius. She is an immortal god,
though in a certain sense she is born at the same time as the man in whom she
is. Consequently, we may say that she dies in the same way that she is
born.Eminent men were also called Gods by the ancients. Deified during life,
even their "shells" were reverenced during a part of the Mysteries.
Belief in
Gods, in Larvę and Umbrę, was a universal belief then, as it is fast
becoming--now. Even the greatest Philosophers, men who have passed to posterity
as the hardest Materialists and Atheists--only because they rejected the
grotesque idea of a personal extra-cosmic God--such as Epicurus, for instance,
believed in Gods and invisible beings. Going far back into antiquity, out of
the great body of Philosophers of the pre-Christian ages, we may mention
Cicero, as one who can least be accused of superstition and credulity. Speaking
of those whom he calls Gods and who are either human or atmospheric spirits, he
says:
We know that
of all livings beings man is the best formed, and, as the gods belong to this
number, they must have a human form. . . . I do not mean to say that the gods
have body and blood in them; but I say that they seem as if they had bodies
with blood in them. . . . Epicurus, for whom hidden things were as tangible as
if he had touched them with his finger, teaches us that gods are not generally
visible, but that they are intelligible; that they are not bodies having a
certain solidity . . . but that we can recognize them by their passing images;
that as there are atoms enough in the infinite space to produce such images,
these are produced before us . . . and make us realize what are these happy,
immortal beings.3If, turning from Greece and Egypt to the cradle of universal
civilization, India, we interrogate the Brāhmans and their most admirable
Philosophies, we find them calling their Gods and their Daimonia by such a
number and variety of appellations, that the thirty-three millions of these
Deities would require a whole library to contain only their names and
attributes. We will choose for the present time only two names out of the
Pantheon. These groups are the most important as well as the least understood
by the Orientalists--their true nature having been all along wrapped in obscurity
by the unwillingness of the Brāhmans to divulge their philosophical secrets. We
will speak of but the Devas and the Pitris.
The former
aerial beings are some of them superior, others inferior, to man. The term
means literally the Shining Ones, the resplendent; and it covers spiritual
beings of various degrees, including entities from previous planetary periods,
who take active part in the formation of new solar systems and the training of
infant humanities, as well as unprogressed Planetary Spirits, who will, at
spiritualistic séances, simulate human deities and even characters on the stage
of human history.
As to the
Deva Yonis, they are Elementals of a lower kind in comparison with the Kosmic
"Gods," and are subjected to the will of even the sorcerer. To this
class belong the gnomes, sylphs, fairies, djins, etc. They are the Soul of the
elements, the capricious forces in Nature, acting under one immutable Law,
inherent in these Centres of Force, with undeveloped consciousness and bodies
of plastic mould, which can be shaped according to the conscious or unconscious
will of the human being who puts himself en rapport with them. It is by
attracting some of the beings of this class that our modern spiritualistic
mediums invest the fading shells of deceased human beings with a kind of
individual force. These beings have never been, but will, in myriads of ages
hence, be evolved into men. They belong to the three lower kingdoms, and
pertain to the Mysteries on account of their dangerous nature.
We have found
a very erroneous opinion gaining ground not only among Spiritualists--who see
the spirits of their disembodied fellow creatures everywhere--but even among
several Orientalists who ought to know better.
It is
generally believed by them that the Sanskrit term Pitris means the spirits of
our direct ancestors; of disembodied people. Hence the argument of some
Spiritualists that fakirs, and other Eastern wonder-workers, are mediums; that
they themselves confess to being unable to produce anything without the help of
the Pitris, of whom they are the obedient instruments. This is in more than one
sense erroneous, the error being first started, we believe, by M. L. Jacolliot,
in his Spiritisme dans le Monde, and Govinda Swami; or, as he spells it,
"the fakir Kovindasami's" phenomena. The Pitris are not the ancestors
of the present living men, but those of the human kind or primitive race; the
spirits of human races which, on the great scale of descending evolution,
preceded our races of men, and were physically, as well as spiritually, far
superior to our modern pigmies. In Mānava-Dharma-Shāstra they are called the
Lunar Ancestors.
The
Hindū--least of all the proud Brāhman--has no such great longing to return to
this land of exile after he has shaken off his mortal coil, as has the average
Spiritualist; nor has death for him any of the great terrors it has for the
Christian. Thus, the most highly developed minds in India will always take care
to declare, while in the act of leaving their tenements of clay,
"Nachapunarāvarti," "I shall not come back," and by this
very declaration is placed beyond the reach of any living man or medium. But,
it may be asked, what then is meant by the Pitris? They are Devas, lunar and
solar, closely connected with human evolution, for the Lunar Pitris are they
who gave their Chhāyās as the models of the First Race in the Fourth Round,
while the Solar Pitris endowed mankind with intellect. Not only so, but these
Lunar Devas passed through all the kingdoms of the terrestrial Chain in the
First Round, and during the Second and Third Rounds "lead and represent
the human element."4
A brief
examination of the part they play will prevent all future confusion in the
student's mind between the Pitris and the Elementals. In the Rig Veda, Vishnu
(or the pervading Fire, Ęther) is shown first striding through the seven
regions of the World in three steps, being a manifestation of the Central Sun.
Later on, he
becomes a manifestation of our solar energy, and is connected with the
septenary form and with the Gods, Agni, Indra and other solar deities.
Therefore,
while the "Sons of Fire," the primeval Seven of our System, emanate
from the primordial Flame, the "Seven Builders" of our Planetary
Chain are the "Mind-born Sons" of the latter, and--their instructors
likewise. For, though in one sense they are all Gods and are all called Pitris
(Pitara, Patres, Fathers), a great though very subtle distinction (quite
Occult) is made which must be noticed. In the Rig Veda they are divided into
two classes--the Pitris Agni-dagdha ("Fire-givers"), and the pitris
Anagni-dagdha ("non-Fire-givers")5
i.e., as
explained exoterically--Pitris who sacrificed to the Gods and those who refused
to do so at the "fire-sacrifice." But the Esoteric and true meaning
is the following. The first or primordial Pitris, the "Seven Sons of
Fire" or of the Flame, are distinguished or divided into seven classes
(like the Seven Sephiroth, and others, see Vāyu Purāna and Harivamsha, also Rig
Veda); three of which classes are Arūpa, formless, "composed of
intellectual not elementary substance," and four are corporeal. The first
are pure Agni (fire) or Sapta-jiva ("seven lives," now become
Sapta-jihva, seven-tongued, as Agni is represented with seven tongues and seven
winds as the wheels of his car). As a formless, purely spiritual essence, in
the first degree of evolution, they could not create that, the prototypical
form of which was not in their minds, as this is the first requisite.
They could
only give birth to "mind-born" beings, their "Sons," the
second class of Pitris (or Prajāpati, or Rishis, etc.), one degree more
material; these, to the third--the last of the Arūpa class. It is only this
last class that was enabled with the help of the Fourth principle of the
Universal Soul (Aditi, Ākāsha) to produce beings that became objective and
having a form.6 But when these came to existence, they were found to possess
such a small proportion of the divine immortal Soul or Fire in them, that they
were considered failures. "The third appealed to the second, the second to
the first, and the Three had to become Four (the perfect square or cube
representing the 'Circle Squared' or immersion of pure Spirit), before the
first could be instructed" (Sansk. Comment.). Then only, could perfect
Beings--intellectually and physically--be shaped. This, though more
philosophical, is still an allegory. But its meaning is plain, however absurd
may seem the explanation from a scientific standpoint. The Doctrine teaches the
Presence of a Universal Life (or motion) within which all is, and nothing
outside of it can be.
This is pure
Spirit. Its manifested aspect is cosmic primordial Matter coeval with, since it
is, itself. Semi-spiritual in comparison to the first, this vehicle of the
Spirit-Life is what Science calls Ether, which fills the boundless space, and
it is in this substance, the world-stuff, that germinates all the atoms and
molecules of what is called matter. However homogeneous in its eternal origin,
this Universal Element, once that its radiations were thrown into the space of
the (to be) manifested Universe, the centripetal and centrifugal forces of
perpetual motion, of attraction and repulsion, would soon polarize its
scattered particles, endowing them with peculiar properties now regarded by
Science as various elements distinct from each other. As a homogeneous whole,
the world-stuff in its primordial state is perfect; disintegrated, it loses its
property of conditionless creative power; it has to associate with its
contraries. Thus, the first worlds and Cosmic Beings, save the
"Self-Existent"--a mystery no one could attempt to touch upon
seriously, as it is a mystery perceived by the divine eye of the highest
Initiates, but one that no human language could explain to the children of our
age--the first worlds and Beings were failures; inasmuch as the former lacked
that inherent creative force in them necessary for their further and
independent evolution, and that the first orders of Beings lacked the immortal
soul. Part and parcel of Anima Mundi in its Prākritic aspect, the Purusha
element in them was too weak to allow of any consciousness in the intervals
(entr' actes) between their existences during the evolutionary period and the
cycle of Life. The three orders of Beings, the Pitri-Rishis, the Sons of Flame,
had to merge and blend together their three higher principles with the Fourth
(the Circle), and the Fifth (the microcosmic) principle before the necessary
union could be obtained and result therefrom achieved. "There were old
worlds, which perished as soon as they came into existence; were formless, as
they were called sparks. These sparks are the primordial worlds which could not
continue because the Sacred Aged had not as yet assumed the form"7 (of
perfect contraries not only in opposite sexes but of cosmical polarity).
"Why were these primordial worlds destroyed? Because," answers the
Zohar, "the man represented by the ten Sephiroth was not as yet. The human
form contains everything {spirit, soul and body}, and as it did not as yet
exist the worlds were destroyed."
Far removed
from the Pitris, then, it will readily be seen are all the various feats of
Indian fakirs, jugglers and others, phenomena a hundred times more various and
astounding than are ever seen in civilized Europe and America. The Pitris have
naught to do with such public exhibitions, nor are the "spirits of the
departed" concerned in them. We have but to consult the lists of the
principal Daimons or Elemental Spirits to find that their very names indicate
their professions, or, to express it clearly, the tricks for which each variety
is best adapted. So we have the Mādan, a generic name indicating wicked
elemental spirits, half brutes, half monsters, for Mādan signifies one that looks
like a cow. He is the friend of the malicious sorcerers and helps them to
effect their evil purposes of revenge by striking men and cattle with sudden
illness and death.
The
Shudāla-Mādan, or graveyard fiend, answers to our ghouls. He delights where
crime and murder were committed, near burial spots and places of execution. He
helps the juggler in all the fire phenomena as well as Kutti Shāttan, the
little juggling imps. Shudāla, they say, is a half-fire, half-water demon, for
he received from Shiva permission to assume any shape he chose, to transform
one thing into another; and when he is not in fire, he is in water. It is he
who blinds people "to see that which they do not see." Shūla Mādan is
another mischievous spook. He is the furnace-demon, skilled in pottery and
baking. If you keep friends with him, he will not injure you; but woe to him
who incurs his wrath. Shūla likes compliments and flattery, and as he generally
keeps underground it is to him that a juggler must look to help him raise a tree
from a seed in a quarter of an hour and ripen its fruit.
Kumil-Mādan,
is the undine proper. He is an Elemental Spirit of the water, and his name
means blowing like a bubble. He is a very merry imp, and will help a friend in
anything relative to his department; he will shower rain and show the future
and the present to those who will resort to hydromancy or divination by water.
Poruthū Mādan
is the "wrestling" demon; he is the strongest of all; and whenever
there are feats shown in which physical force is required, such as levitations,
or taming of wild animals, he will help the performer by keeping him above the
soil, or will over-power a wild beast before the tamer has time to utter his
incantation. So, every "physical manifestation" has its own class of
Elemental Spirits to superintend it. Besides these there are in India the
Pisāchas, Daimons of the races of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires; the
Gandharvas, good Daimons, celestial seraphs, singers; and Asuras and Nāgas, the
Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
These must
not be confused with Elementaries, the souls and shells of departed human
beings; and here again we have to distinguish between what has been called the
astral soul, i.e., the lower part of the dual Fifth Principle, joined to the
animal, and the true Ego. For the doctrine of the Initiates is that no astral
soul, even that of a pure, good, and virtuous man, is immortal in the strictest
sense, "from elements it was formed--to elements it must return." We
may stop here and say no more: every learned Brāhman, every Chelā and
thoughtful Theosophist will understand why. For he knows that while the soul of
the wicked vanishes, and is absorbed without redemption, that of every other
person, even moderately pure, simply changes its ethereal particles for still
more ethereal ones; and, while there remains in it a spark of the Divine, the
god-like man, or rather, his individual Ego, cannot die. Says Proclus:
After death, the
soul (the spirit) continueth to linger in the aėrial body (astral form), till it is entirely purified
from all angry and voluptuous passions . . . then doth it put off by a second
dying the aėrial body as it did the earthly one. Whereupon, the ancients say
that there is a celestial body always joined with the soul, which is immortal,
luminous, and star-like--while the purely human soul or the lower part of the
Fifth Principle is not. The above explanations and the meaning and the real
attributes and mission of the Pitris, may help to better understand this
passage of Plutarch:
And of these
souls the moon is the element, because souls resolve into her, as the bodies of
the deceased do into earth. Those, indeed, who have been virtuous and honest,
living a quiet and philosophical life, without embroiling themselves in
troublesome affairs, are quickly resolved; being left by the nous
(understanding) and no longer using the corporeal passions, they incontinently
vanish away.8The ancientEgyptians, who derived their knowledge from the Āryans
of India, pushed their researches far into the kingdoms of the
"elemental" and "elementary" beings. Modern archęologists
have decided that the figures found depicted on the various papyri of The Book
of the Dead, or other symbols relating to other subjects painted upon their
mummy cases, the walls of their subterranean temples and sculptured on their
buildings, are merely fanciful representations of their Gods on the one hand,
and on the other, a proof of the worship by the Egyptians of cats, dogs, and
all manner of creeping things. This modern idea is wholly wrong, and arises
from ignorance of the astral world and its strange denizens.
There are
many distinct classes of "Elementaries" and "E1ementals."
The highest of the former in intelligence and cunning are the so-called
"terrestrial spirits." Of these it must suffice to say, for the
present, that they are the Larvę, or shadows of those who have lived on earth,
alike of the good and of the bad.
They are the
lower principles of all disembodied beings, and may be divided into three
general groups. The first are they who having refused all spiritual light, have
died deeply immersed in the mire of matter, and from whose sinful Souls the
immortal Spirit has gradually separated itself. These are, properly, the
disembodied Souls of the depraved; these Souls having at some time prior to
death separated themselves from their divine Spirits, and so lost their chance
of immortality. Eliphas Levi and some other Kabalists make little, if any,
distinction between Elementary Spirits who have been men, and those beings
which people the elements, and are the blind forces of nature. Once divorced
from their bodies, these Souls (also called "astral bodies"),
especially those of purely materialistic persons, are irresistibly attracted to
the earth, where they live a temporary and finite life amid elements congenial
to their gross natures.
From having
never, during their natural lives, cultivated their spirituality, but
subordinated it to the material and gross, they are now unfitted for the lofty
career of the pure, disembodied being, for whom the atmosphere of earth is
stifling and mephitic. Its attractions are not only away from earth, but it
cannot, even if it would, owing to its Devachanic condition, have aught to do
with earth and its denizens consciously. Exceptions to this rule will be
pointed out later on. After a more or less prolonged period of time these
material souls will begin to disintegrate, and finally, like a column of mist,
be dissolved, atom by atom, in thesurrounding elements.
These are the
"shells" which remain the longest period in the Kāma Loka; all
saturated with terrestrial effluvia, their Kāma Rūpa (body of desire) thick
with sensuality and made impenetrable to the spiritualizing influence of their
higher principles, endures longer and fades out with difficulty. We are taught
that these remain for centuries sometimes, before the final disintegration into
their respective elements.
The second
group includes all those, who, having had their common share of spirituality,
have yet been more or less attached to things earthly and terrestrial life,
having their aspirations and affections more centred on earth than in heaven;
the stay in Kāma Loka of the reliquię of this class or group of men, who
belonged to the average human being, is of a far shorter duration, yet long in
itself and proportionate to the intensity of their desire for life. Remains, as
a third class, the disembodied souls of those whose bodies have perished by
violence, and these are men in all save the physical body, till their life-span
is complete.
Among
Elementaries are also reckoned by Kabalists what we have called psychic
embryos, the "privation" of the form of the child that is to be.
According to Aristotle's doctrine there are three principles of natural bodies:
privation, matter, and form.
These
principles may be applied in this particular case. The "privation" of
the child which is to be, we locate in the invisible mind of the Universal Soul,
in which all types and forms exist from eternity--privation not being
considered in the Aristotelic philosophy as a principle in the composition of
bodies, but as an external property in their production; for the production is
a change by which the matter passes from the shape it has not to that which it
assumes. Though the privation of the unborn child's form, as well as of the
future form of the unmade watch, is that which is neither substance nor
extension nor quality as yet, nor any kind of existence, it is still something
which is, though its outlines, in order to be, must acquire an objective
form--the abstract must become concrete, in short. Thus, as soon as this
privation of matter is transmitted by energy to universal Ęther, it becomes a
material form, however sublimated.
If modern
Science teaches that human thought "affects the matter of another universe
simultaneously with this," how can he who believes in a Universal Mind
deny that the divine thought is equally transmitted, by the same law of energy,
to our common mediator, the universal Ęther--the lower World-Soul? Very true,
Occult Philosophy denies it intelligence and consciousness in relation to the
finite and conditioned manifestations of this phenomenal world of matter. But
the Vedāntin and Buddhist Philosophies alike, speaking of it as of Absolute
Consciousness, show thereby that the form and progress of every atom of the
conditioned universe must have existed in it throughout the infinite cycles of
Eternity. And, if so, then it must follow that once there, the Divine Thought
manifests itself objectively, energy faithfully reproducing the outlines of
that whose "privation" is already in the divine mind.
Only it must
not be understood that this Thought creates matter, or even the privations. No;
it develops from its latent outline but the design for the future form; the
matter which serves to make this design having always been in existence, and
having been prepared to form a human body, through a series of progressive
transformations, as the result of evolution. Forms pass; ideas that created
them and the material which gave them objectiveness, remain. These models, as
yet devoid of immortal spirits, are "Elementals"--better yet, psychic
embryos--which, when their time arrives, die out of the invisible world, and
are born into this visible one as human infants, receiving in transitu that
Divine Breath called Spirit which completes the perfect man. This class cannot
communicate, either subjectively or objectively, with men.
The essential
difference between the body of such an embryo and an Elemental proper is that
the embryo--the future man--contains in himself a portion of each of the four
great kingdoms, to wit: fire, air, earth and water; while the Elemental has but
a portion of one of such kingdoms. As for instance, the salamander, or the fire
Elemental, which has but a portion of the primordial fire and none other. Man,
being higher than they, the law of evolution finds its illustration of all four
in him. It results therefore, that the Elementals of the fire are not found in
water, nor those of air in the fire kingdom. And yet, inasmuch as a portion of
water is found not only in man but also in other bodies, Elementals exist
really in and among each other in every substance just as the spiritual world
exists and is in the material. But the last are the Elementals in their most
primordial and latent state.
II
Another class
are those elemental beings which will never evolve into human beings in the
present Manvantara, but occupy, as it were, a specific step of the ladder of
being, and, by comparison with the others, may properly be called
nature-spirits, or cosmic agents of nature, each being confined to its own
element and never transgressing the bounds of others. These are what Tertullian
called the "princes of the powers of the air."
In the
teachings of Eastern Kabalists, and of the Western Rosicrucians and Alchemists,
they are spoken of as the creatures evolved in and from the four kingdoms of
earth, air, fire and water, and are respectively called gnomes, sylphs,
salamanders and undines. Forces of nature, they will either operate effects as
the servile agents of general law, or may be employed, as shown above, by the
disembodied spirits--whether pure or impure--and by living adepts of magic and
sorcery, to produce desired phenomenal results. Such beings never become men.9
Under the
general designation of fairies, and fays, these spirits of the elements appear
in the myths, fables, traditions, or poetry of all nations, ancient and modern.
Their names are legion--peris, devs, djins, sylvans, satyrs, fauns, elves,
dwarfs, trolls, norns, nisses, kobolds, brownies, necks, stromkarls, undines,
nixies, goblins, ponkes, banshees, kelpies, pixies, moss people, good people,
good neighbours, wild women, men of peace, white ladies--and many more. They
have been seen, feared, blessed, banned, and invoked in every quarter of the
globe and in every age. Shall we then concede that all who have met them were
hallucinated?
These
Elementals are the principal agents of disembodied but never visible
"shells" taken for spirits at séances, and are, as shown above, the
producers of all the phenomena except the subjective.
In the course
of this article we will adopt the term "Elemental" to designate only
these nature-spirits, attaching it to no other spirit or monad that has been
embodied in human form. Elementals, as said already, have no form, and in
trying to describe what they are, it is better to say that they are "centres
of force" having instinctive desires, but no consciousness, as we
understand it. Hence their acts may be good or bad indifferently.
This class is
believed to possess but one of the three chief attributes of man. They have
neither immortal spirits nor tangible bodies; only astral forms, which partake,
to a distinguishing degree, of the element to which they belong and also of the
ether. They are a combination of sublimated matter and a rudimental mind. Some
remain throughout several cycles changeless, but still have no separate
individuality, acting collectively, so to say. Others, of certain elements and
species, change form under a fixed law which Kabalists explain. The most solid
of their bodies is ordinarily just immaterial enough to escape perception by
our physical eyesight, but not so unsubstantial but that they can be perfectly
recognized by the inner or clairvoyant vision.
They not only
exist and can all live in ether, but can handle and direct it for the
production of physical effects, as readily as we can compress air or water for
the same purpose by pneumatic and hydraulic apparatus; in which occupation they
are readily helped by the "human elementaries," or the
"shells." More than this; they can so condense it as to make for
themselves tangible bodies, which by their Protean powers they can cause to
assume such likeness as they choose, by taking as their models the portraits
they find stamped in the memory of the persons present. It is not necessary
that the sitter should be thinking at the moment of the one represented. His
image may have faded many years before. The mind receives indelible impression
even from chance acquaintances or persons encountered but once. As a few
seconds' exposure of the sensitized photograph plate is all that is requisite
to preserve indefinitely the image of the sitter, so is it with the mind.
According to
the doctrine of Proclus, the uppermost regions from the Zenith of the Universe
to the Moon belonged to the Gods or Planetary Spirits, according to their
hierarchies and classes. The highest among them were the twelve Huper-ouranioi,
or Super-celestial Gods, with whole legions of subordinate Daimons at their
command.
They are
followed next in rank and power by the Egkosmioi, the Inter-cosmic Gods, each
of these presiding over a great number of Daimons, to whom they impart their
power and change it from one to another at will. These are evidently the
personified forces of nature in their mutual correlation, the latter being
represented by the third class, or the Elementals we have just described.
Further on he
shows, on the principle of the Hermetic axiom--of types, and prototypes--that
the lower spheres have their subdivisions and classes of beings as well as the
upper celestial ones, the former being always subordinate to the higher ones.
He held that the four elements are all filled with Daimons, maintaining with
Aristotle that the universe is full, and that there is no void in nature.
The Daimons
of the earth, air, fire, and water are of an elastic, ethereal, semi-corporeal
essence. It is these classes which officiate as intermediate agents between the
Gods and men. Although lower in intelligence than the sixth order of the higher
Daimons, these beings preside directly over the elements and organic life. They
direct the growth, the inflorescence, the properties, and various changes of
plants. They are the personified ideas or virtues shed from the heavenly Hylź
into the inorganic matter; and, as the vegetable kingdom is one remove higher
than the mineral, these emanations from the celestial Gods take form and being
in the plant, they become its soul. It is that which Aristotle's doctrine terms
the form in the three principles of natural bodies, classified by him as
privation, matter, and form.
His
philosophy teaches that besides the original matter, another principle is
necessary to complete the triune nature of every particle, and this is form; an
invisible, but still, in an ontological sense of the word, a substantial being,
really distinct from matter proper. Thus, in an animal or a plant--besides the
bones, the flesh, the nerves, the brains, and the blood, in the former; and
besides the pulpy matter, tissues, fibres, and juice in the latter, which blood
and juice, by circulating' through the veins and fibres, nourishes all parts of
both animal and plant; and besides the animal spirits, which are the principles
of motion, and the chemical energy which is transformed into vital force in the
green leaf--there must be a substantial form, which Aristotle called in the
horse, the horse's soul; Proclus, the daimon of every mineral, plant, or
animal, and the medięval philosophers, the elementary spirits of the four
kingdoms.
All this is
held in our century as "poetical metaphysics" and gross superstition.
Still on strictly ontological principles, there is, in these old hypotheses,
some shadow of probability, some clue to the perplexing missing links of exact
science.
The latter
has become so dogmatic of late, that all that lies beyond the ken of inductive
science is termed imaginary; and we find Professor Joseph Le Conte stating that
some of the best scientists "ridicule the use of the term 'vital force,'
or vitality, as a remnant of superstition.''10 De Candolle suggests the term
"vital movement," instead of vital force;11 thus preparing for a
final scientific leap which will transform the immortal, thinking man, into an
automaton with clock-work inside him. "But," objects Le Conte,
"can we conceive of movement without force? And if the movement is peculiar,
so also is the form of force."
In the Jewish
Kabalah, the nature-spirits were known under the general name of Shedim, and
divided into four classes. The Hindūs call them Bhūtas and Devas, and the
Persians called them all Devs; the Greeks indistinctly designated them as
Daimons; the Egyptians knew them as Afrites.
The ancient
Mexicans, says Kaiser, believed in numerous spirit-abodes, into one of which
the shades of innocent children were placed until final disposal; into another,
situated in the sun, ascended the valiant souls of heroes; while the hideous
spectres of incorrigible sinner were sentenced to wander and despair in
subterranean caves, held in the bonds of the earth-atmosphere, unwilling and
unable to liberate themselves.
This proves
pretty clearly that the "ancient" Mexicans knew something of the
doctrines of Kāma Loka. These passed their time in communicating with mortals,
and frightening those who could see them. Some of the African tribes know them
as Yowahoos. In the Indian Pantheon, as we have often remarked, there are no
less than 330,000,000 of various kinds of spirits, including Elementals, some
of which were termed by the Brāhmans, Daityas. These beings are known by the
adepts to be attracted toward certain quarters of the heavens by something of
the same mysterious property which makes the magnetic needle turn toward the
north, and certain plants to obey the same attraction. If we will only bear in
mind the fact that the rushing of planets through space must create as absolute
a disturbance in the plastic and attenuated medium of the ether, as the passage
of a cannon shot does in the air, or that of a steamer in the water, and on a
cosmic scale, we can understand that certain planetary aspects, admitting our
premises to be true, may produce much more violent agitation and cause much
stronger currents to flow in a given direction than others. We can also see
why, by such various aspects of the stars, shoals of friendly or hostile
Elementals might be poured in upon our atmosphere, or some particular portion
of it, and make the fact appreciable by the effects which ensue.
If our royal
astronomers are able, at times, to predict cataclysms, such as earthquakes and
inundations, the Indian astrologers and mathematicians can do so, and have so
done, with far more precision and correctness, though they act on lines which
to the modern sceptic appear ridiculously absurd.
The various
races of spirits are also believed to have a special sympathy with certain
human temperaments, and to more readily exert power over such than others.
Thus, a bilious, lymphatic, nervous, or sanguine person would be affected
favourably or otherwise by conditions of the astral light, resulting from the
different aspects of the planetary bodies. Having reached this general
principle, after recorded observations extending over an indefinite series of
years, or ages, the adept astrologer would require only to know what the
planetary aspects were at a given anterior date, and to apply his knowledge of
the succeeding changes in the heavenly bodies, to be able to trace, with
approximate accuracy, the varying fortunes of the personage whose horoscope was
required, and even to predict the future. The accuracy of the horoscope would
depend, of course, no less upon the astrologer's astronomical erudition than
upon his knowledge of the occult forces and races of nature.
Pythagoras
taught that the entire universe is one vast series of mathematically correct
combinations. Plato shows the Deity geometrizing. The world is sustained by the
same law of equilibrium and harmony upon which it was built. The centripetal
force could not manifest itself without the centrifugal in the harmonious
revolutions of the spheres; all forms are the product of this dual force in nature.
Thus, to illustrate our case, we may designate the spirit as the centrifugal,
and the soul as the centripetal, spiritual energies. When in perfect harmony,
both forces produce one result; break or damage the centripetal motion of the
earthly soul tending toward the center which attracts it; arrest
its progress
by clogging it with a heavier weight of matter than it can bear, and the
harmony of the whole, which was its life, is destroyed. Individual life can
only be continued if sustained by this two-fold force. The least deviation from
harmony damages it; when it is destroyed beyond redemption, the forces separate
and the form is gradually annihilated.
After the
death of the depraved and the wicked, arrives the critical moment. If during
life the ultimate and desperate effort of the inner self to reunite itself with
the faintly-glimmering ray of its divine monad is neglected; if this ray is
allowed to be more and more shut out by the thickening crust of matter, the
soul, once freed from the body, follows its earthly attractions, and is
magnetically drawn into and held within the dense fogs of the material
atmosphere of the Kāma Loka. Then it begins to sink lower and lower, until it
finds itself, when returned to consciousness, in what the ancients termed
Hades, and we--Avichī.
The
annihilation of such a soul is never instantaneous; it may last centuries,
perhaps; for nature never proceeds by jumps and starts, and the astral soul of
the personality being formed of elements, the law of evolution must bide its
time. Then begins the fearful law of compensation, the Yin-youan of the
Buddhist initiates.
This class of
spirits are called the "terrestrial," or "earthly
elementaries," in contradistinction to the other classes, as we have shown
in the beginning.
But there is
another and still more dangerous class. In the East, they are known as the
"Brothers of the Shadow," living men possessed by the earth-bound
elementaries; at times--their masters, but ever in the long run falling victims
to these terrible beings. In Sikkhim and Tibet they are called Dugpas
(red-caps), in contradistinction to the Geluk-pas (yellow-caps), to which
latter most of the adepts belong. And here we must beg the reader not to
misunderstand us. For though the whole of Būtan and Sikkhim belongs to the old
religion of the Bhons, now known generally as the Dug-pas, we do not mean to
have it understood that the whole of the population is possessed, en masse, or
that they are all sorcerers.
Among them
are found as good men as anywhere else, and we speak above only of the élite of
their Lamaseries, of a nucleus of priests, "devil-dancers," and
fetish worshippers, whose dreadful and mysterious rites are utterly unknown to
the greater part of the population. Thus there are two classes of these
terrible "Brothers of the Shadow"--the living and the dead. Both
cunning, low, vindictive, and seeking to retaliate their sufferings upon
humanity, they become, until final annihilation, vampires, ghouls, and
prominent actors at séances.
These are the
leading "stars," on the great spiritual stage of
"materialization," which phenomenon they perform with the help of the
more intelligent of the genuine-born "elemental" creatures, which
hover around and welcome them with delight in their own spheres. Henry Kunrath,
the great German Kabalist, in his rare work, Amphitheatrum Sapientę Ęternę has
a plate with representations of the four classes of these human
"elementary spirits." Once past the threshold of the sanctuary of
initiation, once that an adept has lifted the "Veil of Isis," the
mysterious and jealous Goddess, he has nothing to fear; but till then he is in
constant danger.
Magi and
theurgic philosophers objected most severely to the "evocation of
souls." "Bring her (the soul) not forth, lest in departing she retain
something," says Psellus. "It becomes you not to behold them before
your body is initiated, since, by always alluring, they seduce the souls of the
uninitiated"--says the same philosopher, in another passage.
They objected
to it for several good reasons. 1. "It is extremely difficult to
distinguish a good Daimon from a bad one," says Iamblichus. 2. If the
shell of a good man succeeds in penetrating the density of the earth's
atmosphere--always oppressive to it, Often hateful--still there is a danger
that it cannot avoid; the soul is unable to come into proximity with the
material world without that on "departing, she retains something,"
that is to say, she contaminates her purity, for which she has to suffer more
or less after her departure.
Therefore,
the true theurgist will avoid causing any more suffering to this pure denizen
of the higher sphere than is absolutely required by the interests of humanity.
It is only the
practitioners of black magic--such as the Dugpas of Bhūtan and Sikkhim--who
compel the presence, by the powerful incantations of necromancy, of
the tainted
souls of such as have lived bad lives, and are ready to aid their selfish
designs.
Of intercourse
with the Augides, through the mediumistic powers of subjective mediums, we
elsewhere speak.
The
theurgists employed chemicals and mineral substances to chase away evil
spirits. Of the latter, a stone called Mnizurin was one of the most powerful
agents. "When you shall see a terrestrial Daimon approaching, exclaim, and
sacrifice the stone Mnizurin"--exclaims a Zoroastrian Oracle (Psel., 40).
These
"Daimons" seek to introduce themselves into the bodies of the
simple-minded and idiots, and remain there until dislodged therefrom by a
powerful and pure will. Jesus, Apollonius, and some of the apostles, had the
power to cast out "devils," by purifying the atmosphere within and
without the patient, so as to force the unwelcome tenant to flight. Certain volatile
salts are particularly obnoxious to them; Zoroaster is corroborated in this by
Mr. C. F. Varley, and ancient science is justified by modern. The effect of
some chemicals used in a saucer and placed under the bed, by Mr. Varley, of
London,12 for the purpose of keeping away some disagreeable physical phenomena
at night, are corroborative of this great truth. Pure or even simply
inoffensive human spirits fear nothing, for having rid themselves of
terrestrial matter, terrestrial compounds can affect them in no wise; such
spirits are like a breath. Not so with the earth-bound souls and the
nature-spirits.
It is for
these carnal terrestrial Larvę, degraded human spirits, that the ancient
Kabalists entertained a hope of reļncarnation. But when, or how?
At a fitting
moment, and if helped by a sincere desire for his amendment and repentance by
some strong, sympathizing person, or the will of an adept, or even a desire
emanating from the erring spirit himself, provided it is powerful enough to
make him throw off the burden of sinful matter. Losing all consciousness, the
once bright monad is caught once more into the vortex of our terrestrial
evolution, and repasses the subordinate kingdoms, and again breathes as a
living child.
To compute
the time necessary for the completion of this process would be impossible.
Since there is no perception of time in eternity, the attempt would be a mere
waste of labour. Speaking of the elementary, Porphyry says:
These
invisible beings have been receiving from men honours as gods; . . . a
universal belief makes them capable of becoming very malevolent; it proves that
their wrath is kindled against those who neglect to offer them a legitimate
worship.13Homer describes them in the following terms:
Our gods
appear to us when we offer them sacrifice . . . sitting themselves at our
tables, they partake of our festival meals. Whenever they meet on his travels a
solitary Phnician, they serve to him as guides, and otherwise manifest their
presence. We can say that our piety approaches us to them as much as crime and
bloodshed unite the Cyclopes and the ferocious race of Giants.14The latter
proves that these Gods were kind and beneficent Daimons, and that, whether they
were disembodied spirits or elemental beings, they were no "devils."
The language
of Porphyry, who was himself a direct disciple of Plotinus, is still more
explicit as to the nature of these spirits.
Daimons are
invisible; but they know how to clothe themselves with forms and configurations
subjected to numerous variations, which can be explained by their nature having
much of the corporeal in itself. Their abode is in the neighbourhood of the
earth . . . and when they can escape the vigilance of the good Daimons, there
is no mischief they win not tare commit. One day they will employ brute force;
another, cunning.15 Further, he says:
It is a
child's play for them to arouse in us vile passions, to impart to societies and
nations turbulent doctrines, provoking wars, seditions, and other public
calamities, and then tell you "that all of these are the work of the
gods." . . .
These spirits
pass their time in cheating and deceiving mortals, creating around them
illusions and prodigies; their greatest ambition is to pass as gods and souls
(disembodied spirits).16Iamblichus, the great theurgist of the Neoplatonic
school, a man skilled in sacred magic, teaches that:
Good Daimons
appear to us in reality, while the bad ones can manifest themselves but under
the shadowy forms of phantoms.Further, he corroborates Porphyry, and tells how
that:
The good ones
fear not the light, while the wicked ones require darkness . . .
The
sensations they excite in us make us believe in the presence and reality of things
they show, though these things be absent.17Even the most practised theurgists
sometimes found danger in their dealings with certain elementaries, and we have
Iamblichus stating that:
The gods, the
angels, and the Daimons, as well as the souls, may be summoned through
evocation and prayer . . . But when, during theurgic operations, a mistake is
made, beware! Do not imagine that you are communicating with beneficent
divinities, who have answered your earnest prayer; no, for they are bad
Daimons, only under the guise of good ones!
For the
elementaries often clothe themselves with the similitude of the good, and
assume a rank very much superior to that they really occupy. Their boasting
betrays them.18The ancients, who named but four elements, made of ether a
fifth. On account of its essence being made divine by the unseen presence, it
was considered as a medium between this world and the next.
They held
that when the directing intelligences retired from any portion of ether, one of
the four kingdoms which they are bound to superintend, the space was left in
possession of evil. An adept who prepared to converse with the
"invisibles," had to know his ritual well, and be perfectly
acquainted with the conditions required for the perfect equilibrium of the four
elements in the astral light. First of all, he must purify the essence, and
within the circle in which he sought to attract the pure spirits, equilibrize
the elements, so as to prevent the ingress of the Elementals into their
respective spheres. But woe to the imprudent enquirer who ignorantly trespasses
upon forbidden ground; danger will beset him at every step. He evokes powers
that he cannot control; he arouses sentries which allow only their masters to
pass. For, in the words of the immortal Rosicrucian:
Once that
thou hast resolved to become a coöperator with the spirit of the living God,
take care not to hinder Him in His work; for, if thy heat exceeds the natural
proportion, thou hast stirr'd the wrath of the moyst19 natures, and they will
stand up against the central fire, and the central fire against them, and there
will be a terrible division in the chaos.20The spirit of harmony and union will
depart from the elements, disturbed by the imprudent hand; and the currents of
blind forces will become immediately infested by numberless creatures of matter
and instinct--the bad demons of the theurgists, the devils
of theology;
the gnomes, salamanders, sylphs, and undines will assail he rash performer
under multifarious aėrial forms. Unable to invent anything, they will search
your memory to its very depths; hence the nervous exhaustion and mental
oppression of certain sensitive natures at spiritual circles.
The
Elementals will bring to light long-forgotten remembrances of the past; forms,
images, sweet mementoes, and familiar sentences, long since faded from our own
remembrance, but vividly preserved in the inscrutable depths of our memory and
on the astral tablets of the imperishable "Book of Life."
The author of
the Homoiomerian system of philosophy, Anaxagoras of Clazomene, firmly believed
that the spiritual prototypes of all things, as well as their elements, were to
be found in the boundless ether, where they were generated, whence they
evolved, and whither they returned from earth. In common with the Hindūs who
had personified their Ākāsha, and made of it a deific entity, the Greeks and
Latins had deified Ęther. Virgil calls Zeus, Pater Omnipotens Ęther,21 Magnus,
the Great God, Ether.
These beings,
the elemental spirits of the Kabalists,22 are those whom the Christian clergy
denounce as "devils," the enemies of mankind!
III
Every
organized thing in this world, visible as well as invisible, has an element
appropriate to itself. The fish lives and breathes in the water; the plant
consumes carbonic acid, which for animals and men produces death; some beings
are fitted for rarefied strata of air, others exist only in the densest.
Life to some
is dependent on sunlight, to others, upon darkness; and so the wise economy of
nature adapts to each existing condition some living form.
These
analogies warrant the conclusion that, not only is there no unoccupied portion
of universal nature, but also that for each thing that has life, special
conditions are furnished, and, being furnished, they are necessary. Now,
assuming that there is an invisible side to the universe, the fixed habit of
nature warrants the conclusion that this half is occupied, like the other half;
and that each group of its occupants is supplied with the indispensable conditions
of existence.
It is as
illogical to imagine that identical conditions are furnished to all, as it
would be to maintain such a theory respecting the inhabitants of the domain of
visible nature. That there are "spirits" implies that there is a diversity
of "spirits"; for men differ, and human "spirits" are but
disembodied men.
To say that
all "spirits" are alike, or fitted to the same atmosphere, or
possessed of like powers, or governed by the same attractions--electric,
magnetic, odic, astral, it matters not which--is as absurd as though one should
say that all planets have the same nature, or that all animals are amphibious,
or that all men can be nourished on the same food.
To begin
with, neither the elementals, nor the elementaries themselves, can be called
"spirits" at all. It accords with reason to suppose that the grossest
natures among them will sink to the lowest depths of the spiritual
atmosphere--in other words, be found nearest to the earth. Inversely, the
purest will be farthest away.
In what, were
we to coin a word, we should call the "psychomatics" of Occultism, it
is as unwarrantable to assume that either of these grades of ethereal beings
can occupy the place, or subsist in the conditions, of the other, as it would
be in hydraulics to expect that two liquids of different densities could
exchange their markings on the scale of Beaume's hydrometer.
Görres,
describing a conversation he had with some Hindūs of the Malabar coast,
reports that
upon asking them whether they had ghosts among them, they replied:
Yes, but we
know them to be bad bhūts [spirits, or rather, the "empty" ones, the
"shells"], . . . good ones can hardly ever appear at all.
They are
principally the spirits of suicides and murderers, or of those who die violent
deaths. They constantly flutter about and appear as phantoms. Night-time is
favourable to them, they seduce the feeble-minded and tempt others in a
thousand different ways.23Porphyry presents to us some hideous facts whose
verity is substantiated in the experience of every student of magic. He writes:
The soul,24
having even after death a certain affection for its body, art affinity
proportioned to the violence with which their union was broken, we see many
spirits hovering in despair about their earthly remains; we even see them
eagerly seeking the putrid remains of other bodies, but above all
freshly-spilled blood, which seems to impart to them for the moment some of the
faculties of life.25.Though spiritualists discredit them ever so much, these nature-spirits--as
much as the "elementaries," the "empty shells," as the
Hindus call them--are realities. If the gnomes, sylphs, salamanders and undines
of the Rosicrucians existed in their days, they must exist now. Bulwer Lytton's
"Dweller on the Threshold" is a modern conception, modelled on the
ancient type of the Sulanuth of the Hebrews and Egyptians, which is mentioned
in the Book of Jasher.26
The
Christians are very wrong to treat them indiscriminately, as
"devils," "imps of Satan," and to give them like
characteristics names. The elementals are nothing of the kind, but simply
creatures of ethereal matter, irresponsible, and neither good nor bad, unless
influenced by a superior intelligence. It is very extraordinary to hear devout
Catholics abuse and misrepresent the nature-spirits, when one of their greatest
authorities, Clement the Alexandrian, has described these creatures as they
really are. Clement, who perhaps had been a theurgist as well as an
Neoplatonist, and thus argued upon good authority, remarks, that it is absurd
to call them devils,27 for they are only inferior angels, "the powers
which inhabit elements, move the winds and distribute showers, and as such are
agents and subject to God."28 Origen, who before he became a Christian
also belonged to the Platonic school, is of the same opinion. Porphyry, as we
have seen, describes these daimons more carefully than any one else.
The Secret
Doctrine teaches that man, if he wins immortality, will remain for ever the
septenary trinity that he is in life, and will continue so throughout all the
spheres.
The astral
body, which in this life is covered by a gross physical envelope, becomes--when
relieved of that covering by the process of corporeal death--in its turn the
shell of another and more ethereal body.
This begins
developing from the moment of death, and becomes perfected when the astral body
of the earthly form finally separates from it. This process, they say, is
repeated at every new transition from sphere to sphere of life. But the immortal
soul, the "silvery spark," observed byDr. Fenwick in Margrave's brain
(in Bulwer Lytton's Strange Story), and not found by him in the animals, never
changes, but remains indestructible "by aught that shatters its
tabernacle." The descriptions by Porphyry and Iamblichus and others, of
the spirits of animals, which inhabit the astral light, are corroborated by
those of many of the most trustworthy and intelligent clairvoyants.
Sometimes the
animal forms are even made visible to every person at a spiritual circle, by
being materialized. In his People from the Other World, Colonel H. S. Olcott
describes a materialized squirrel which followed a spirit-woman into the view
of the spectators, disappeared and reappeared before their eyes several times,
and finally followed the spirit into the cabinet. The facts given in modern
spiritualistic literature are numerous and many of them are trustworthy.
As to the
human spirit, the notions of the older philosophers and medięval Kabalists
while differing in some particulars, agreed on the whole; so that the doctrine
of one may be viewed as the doctrine of the other. The most substantial
difference consisted in the location of the immortal or divine spirit of man.
While the ancient
Neoplatonists held that the Augides never descends hypostatically into the
living man, but only more or less sheds its radiance on the inner man--the
astral soul--the Kabalists of the middle ages maintained that the spirit,
detaching itself from the ocean of light and spirit, entered into man's soul,
where it remained through life imprisoned in the astral capsule.
This
difference was the result of the belief of Christian Kabalists, more or less,
in the dead letter of the allegory of the fall of man. The soul, they said,
became, through the "fall of Adam," contaminated with the world of
matter, or Satan. Before it could appear with its enclosed divine spirit in the
presence of the Eternal, it had to purify itself of the impurities of darkness.
They compared--
The spirit
imprisoned within the soul to a drop of water enclosed within a capsule of
gelatine and thrown in the ocean; so long as the capsule remains whole the drop
of water remains isolated; break the envelope and the drop becomes a part of
the ocean--its individual existence has ceased. So it is with the spirit. As
long as it is enclosed in its plastic mediator, or soul, it has an individual
existence. Destroy the capsule, a result which may occur from the agonies of
withered conscience, crime, and moral disease, and the spirit returns back to
its original abode. Its individuality is gone.On the other hand, the
philosophers who explained the "fall into generation" in their own
way, viewed spirit as something wholly distinct from the soul.
They allowed
its presence in the astral capsule only so far as the spiritual emanations or
rays of the "shining one" were concerned. Man and his spiritual soul
or the monad--i.e., spirit and its vehicle--had to conquer their immortality by
ascending toward the unity with which, if successful, they were finally linked,
and into which they were absorbed, so to say.
The
individualization of man after death depended on the spirit, not on his astral
or human soul--Manas and its vehicle Kāma Rūpa--and body. Although the word
"personality," in the sense in which it is usually understood, is an
absurdity, if applied literally to our immortal essence, still the latter is a
distinct entity, immortal and eternal, per se; and when (as in the case of criminals
beyond redemption) the shining thread which links the spirit to the soul, from
the moment of the birth of a child, is violently snapped, and the disembodied
personal entity is left to share the fate of the lower animals, to gradually
dissolve into ether, fall into the terrible state of Āvīchi, or disappear
entirely in the eighth sphere and have its complete personality
annihilated--even then the spirit remains a distinct being.
It becomes a
planetary spirit, an angel; for the gods of the Pagan or the archangels of the
Christian, the direct emanations of the One Cause, notwithstanding the
hazardous statement of Swedenborg, never were nor will they be men, on our
planet, at least.This specialization has been in all ages the stumbling-block
of metaphysicians.
The whole
esotericism of the Buddhistic philosophy is based on this mysterious teaching,
understood by so few persons, and so totally misrepresented by many of the most
learned scholars. Even metaphysicians are too inclined to confound the effect
with the cause.
A person may have won his immortal life, and remain the same inner self he was on earth, throughout eternity; but this does not imply necessarily that he must either remain the Mr. Smith or Brown he was on earth, or lose his individuality. Therefore, the astral soul, i.e., the personality, like the terrestrial body and the lower portion of the human soul of man, may, in the dark hereafter, be absorbed into the cosmical ocean of sublimated elements, and cease to feel its personal individuality, if it did not deserve to soar higher, and the divine spirit, or spiritual individuality, still remain an unchanged entity, though th