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STRAY THOUGHTS ON DEATH AND SATAN
[As appears from a letter of Master K.H. to A.P. Sinnett, received February 2, 1883 (The Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett, p. 196), at one time or another after the publication of this article the Master precipitated some remarks and comments on a couple of pages of The Theosophist which contain Éliphas Lévi’s articles on “Death” and “Satan.” He also underlined certain passages in Lévi’s text. In his Letter to Sinnett, the Master suggests that he reflect upon certain words used, such, for instance, as drones, etc. These pages from The Theosophist are among the so-called “Mahatma Papers” in the holdings of the British Museum, and we have incorporated the Master’s comments in the present reproduction of this article.]
288 TO THE EDITOR OF The Theosophist.
Madam,—Since you have published a posthumous letter of my Master and beloved friend, the late Éliphas Lévi, I think it would be agreeable to you to publish, if judged suitable, a few extracts of the many manuscripts in my possession, written expressly for, and given to, me by my ever-regretted MASTER.
To begin, I send you—“Stray Thoughts on Death and Satan” from his pen.
I cannot close this letter without expressing the deep indignation aroused in me by the base diatribes published in the London Spiritualist against your Society and its members. Every honest heart is irritated at such unfair treatment, especially when proceeding from a man of honour as Mr. Harrison (Editor of The Spiritualist) who admits in his journal anonymous contributions that are tantamount to libels.
With the utmost respect, I remain, Madam, Yours devotedly, BARON J. SPEDALIERI.
Marseilles, July 29, 1881.
Editor’s Note.—It is with feelings of sincere gratitude that we thank Baron Spedalieri for his most valuable contribution. The late Éliphas Lévi was the most learned Kabalist and Occultist of our age in Europe, and everything from his pen is precious to us, in so far as it helps us to compare notes with the Eastern Occult doctrines and, by the light thrown upon both, to prove to the world of Spiritualists and Mystics, that the two systems, the Eastern-Aryan, and the Western or the Chaldeo-Jewish Kabala—are one in their principal metaphysical tenets. Only, while the Eastern Occultists have never lost the key to their esoterism, and are daily verifying and elaborating their doctrines by personal experiments, and by the additional light of modern science, the Western or Jewish Kabalists, besides having been misled for centuries by the introduction of foreign elements in it, such as Christian dogmas, dead letter interpretations of the Bible, etc., 289 have most undeniably lost the true key to the esoteric meaning of Shimon Ben Yochai’s Kabala, and are trying to make up for the loss, by interpretations emanating from the depths of their imagination and inner consciousness. Such is evidently the case with J. K., the self-styled London “Adept,” whose anonymous and powerless vilifications of the Theosophical Society and its members are pertinently regarded by Baron Spedalieri as “tantamount to libels.” But we have to be charitable. That poor descendant of the Biblical Levites—as we know him to be—in his pigmy efforts to upset the Theosophists, has most evidently fractured his brain against one of his own “occult” sentences. There is one especially in The Spiritualist (July 22), to which the attention of the mystically inclined is drawn further down, as this paragraph is most probably the cause of the sad accident which befell so handsome a head. Be it as it may, but it now disables the illustrious J.K. from communicating “scientifically his knowledge” and forces him at the same time to remain, as he expresses it “in an incommunicable ecstatic state.” For it is in no other “state” that our great modern adept, the literary man of such a “calibre”[1] that to suspect him of “ignorance” becomes equal, in audacity, to throwing suspicion upon the virtue of Caesar’s wife—could possibly have written the following lines, intended by him, we believe, as a lucid and clear exposition of his own psycho-Kabalistic 290 lore as juxtaposed to the “hard words,” “outlandish verbiage,” “moral and philosophical platitudes,” and “jawbreakers” of “the learned Theosophists.”
These are the “gems of occult wisdom” of the illustrious Jewish Kabalist who, like a bashful violet, hides his occult learning under two modest initials.
In every human creature there lies latent in the involitional part of the being a sufficient quantity of the omniscient, the absolute. To induce the latent absolute, which is the involitional part of our volitional conscious being, to become manifest, it is essential that the volitional part of our being should become latent. After the preparatory purification from acquired depravities, a kind of introversion has to take place; the involitional has to become volitional, by the volitional becoming involitional. When the conscious becomes semi-unconscious, the, to us, formerly unconscious becomes fully conscious. The particle of the omniscient that is within us, the vital and growing, sleepless, involitional, occult or female principle being allowed to express itself in the volitional, mental, manifest, or masculine part of the human being, while the latter remains in a state of perfect passivity, the two formerly dissevered parts become re-united as one holy (wholly) perfect being, and then the divine manifestation is inevitable.
Very luckily, J. K. gives us himself the key to this grandiloquent gush:
. . . necessarily [he adds] this is only safely practicable while living in uncompromisingly firm purity, for otherwise there is danger of unbalancement—insanity, or a questionable form of mediumship.
The italics are ours. Evidently with our immaculate “adept” the “involitional, occult or female principle” was not allowed to “express itself in the volitional, mental, manifest, or masculine part” of his being, and—behold the results!!
For the edification of our Hindu readers, who are unprogressive enough to refuse reading the lucubrations of “J. K.” or follow the mental “grand trapeze” performed by this remarkable “Adept” in the columns of The Spiritualist, we may add that in the same article he informs his English readers that it is “Hindu mystification acting on Western credulity” which “brought out the Theosophical Society.” “Hindu philosophy,” according to that great light of the 291 nineteenth century is no “philosophy” but “rather mysticism.”
. . . Following the track of the mystifying and mystified Hindus they (the Theosophists) consider the four above faculties (Siddhis of Krishna) Anima, Mahima, Laghima and Garima to be the power they (we) have to strive for. . . . Indeed, what a ludicrous confusion of effect with cause!
The fracture of the brain must have been serious indeed. Let us hope that timely and repeated lotions of “witch hazel” or “the Universal Magic Balm” will have its good effects. Meanwhile, we turn the attention of our Hindu readers and students of Occultism to the identity of the doctrines taught by Éliphas Lévi (who, too, is contemptuously sneered at, and sent by the “Adept” to keep company with “Brothers,” Yogis, and “Fakirs”) in every essential and vital point with those of our Eastern initiates.
[In the two Essays of Éliphas Lévi which follow, the Comments of Master K.H. are printed in bold type, parallel with the text itself. They are numbered to correspond with similar numbers inserted in square brackets within the body of the essays. Words and sentences which are underlined have been underscored by K. H. himself. The footnotes signed Ed. Theosophist, as well as the long Editorial Note, are by H.P.B. herself.—Compiler.]
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Death is the necessary dissolution of imperfect combinations. [1] It is the re-absorption of the rough outline of individual |
[1] Of the 1, 2, 3d, 4, 5th. |
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[2] life into the great work of universal life; only the perfect |
[2] The personality of the personal Ego. |
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[3] is immortal.It is a bath in oblivion. |
[3] The 6th and 7th Prles. |
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[4] It is the fountain of youth where on one side plunges old age, and whence on the other issues infancy.[2]Death is the transfiguration of the living; corpses are but the dead leaves of the Tree of Life which will still have all its leaves in the spring. |
[4] Until the hour of remembrance. |
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[5] The resurrection |
[5] In the language of the Kabalist “Spring” means the beginning of that state when the Ego reaches its omniscience. |
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[6] of men resembles eternally these leaves.Perishable forms are conditioned by immortal types.All who have lived upon earth, live there still in new exemplars of their types, but the souls which have surpassed their type receive elsewhere a new form based upon a |
[6] The Chaldean “resurrection in life eternal” borrowed by the Xtians means resurrection in Nirvâna. |
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more perfect type, as they mount ever on the ladder of worlds;[3] the bad exemplars are broken, and their matter returned into the general mass.[4] Our souls are as it were a music, of which our bodies are the instruments. The music exists without the instruments, but it cannot make itself heard without a material intermediary; | |
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[8] the immaterial can neither be conceived nor grasped.Man in his present existence only retains certain predispositions from his past existences. |
[8] Hence Spirit cannot communicate. |
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[9] Evocations of the dead are but condensations of memory, the imaginary coloration of the shades. To evoke those who are no longer there, is but to cause their types to re-issue from the imagination of nature.[5] |
[9] Karma. |
Footnotes
- ↑ “To accuse a literary man of my calibre of ignorance, is as amusing a mistake as it would have been to charge Porson of ignorance of Greek,” he writes in The Spiritualist of July 8. . . . “The occult is my special subject, and . . . there is but little . . . that I do not know,” he adds. Now, the above sentence sets the question at rest with us. Not only an “adept” but no layman or profane of the most widely recognized intellect and ability, would have ever dared, under the penalty of being henceforth and forever regarded as the most ridiculously conceited of Aesop’s heroes—to use such a sentence when speaking of himself! So stupidly arrogant, and cowardly impertinent has he shown himself behind the shield of his initials to far better and more worthy men than himself, in his transparent attacks upon them in the above-named Spiritualist—that it is the first and certainly the last time that we do him the honour of noticing him in these columns. Our journal has a nobler task, we trust, than to be polemizing with those, whom in vulgar parlance the world generally terms—bullies.
- ↑ Rebirth of the Ego after death. The Eastern, and especially Buddhistic doctrine of the evolution of the new, out of the old Ego.—Ed. Theosophist.
- ↑ From one loka to the other; from a positive world of causes and activity, to a negative world of effects and passivity.—Ed. Theosophist.
- ↑
Into Cosmic matter, when they necessarily lose their self-consciousness or individuality, [7] or are annihilated, as the Eastern Kabalists say.—Ed. Theosophist.
[7] Their Monad 6th and 7th Principles. - ↑ 5