Legend
< On the Food of the Theosophist* (continued from page 10-288) >
acts some of the bad effects of hard water. The coffee must be pure, without chicory, which neutralizes some of its beneficial action. To insure this, it is a good plan to grind the freshly roasted beans at home. Coffee is said to prevent waste of time, and certainly a cup of cafe au lait will carry one through a good deal of work. With the virtues of tea I am not so well acquainted; it opens the pores of the skin, and for this reason, may be pleasanter to take in a feverish state than coffee; but this fact makes it less nourishing, and it is certainly, on account of the tannin it contains, a very bad drink for anyone with a delicate digestion. All vegetables are good articles of food; also beans and lentils, and the latter are most healthful. But, secondly, Nature requires to be spiritually fed. Many assert that we only assimilate the spiritual part of our food, and, for this reason a certain bulk is necessary, that is to say, a pound of meal made into bread, or porridge, would be better for us, than the same quantity boiled in water, strained, and taken as gruel, for thus, some of the constituents are lost; and this would explain why essences, finely ground flour, and chemical foods are less nourishing than fresh food naturally prepared, for we no doubt injure this spiritual essence by preparing our food in too concentrated a form.
We are told by Theosophists, to avoid eating the flesh of animals, not only because of the cruelty involved in our doing so, but also, because it is impossible to escape the animal magnetism of their blood. Moses said, “The blood, which is the life thereof, thou mayest not eat,” and the Jews to this day, in obedience to this command, have their meat killed in a different way from ours, and, I am told, marked in a peculiar way, before it is sent to market.
As man is said to represent a triangle, or pyramid of three points, two magnetic, in the body, and one electrical in the brain, a miniature universe, in fact, his food ought, one would say, to be magnetic as well as electrical.* In grains and fruit, we have the stored-up heat and light of the sun, which is electricity, and in roots, we have the magnetism absorbed from the earth. I am aware, severe occultists forbid the eating of most vegetables and roots, though they come within the letter and spirit of the command, given in Genesis, being “herbs bearing seed,” but I cannot see any reason for their being forbidden, except that they help to strengthen the body, which must be kept under by those who wish to take the Kingdom of Heaven by force. But we, who believe that Jesus Christ came down to call, not the righteous, but the sinners; not the strong and healthy, but the poor and the lame, the halt and the blind, all the negatives in fact, whose spiritual and bodily conditions would prevent their being initiated by man, must see how necessary it is for us to do all in our power to make our bodies meet to receive the Holy Spirit, remembering that “no man putteth new wine into old bottles.” It may be urged, the only difference between magnetism and electricity is tension; f but one note in music differs from another only in tension, and yet, what a wonderful science is built up from this little difference; they are also said to be convertible, and are converted one into the other, and no doubt they are in a healthy organism.
We have all heard of the praises of celery, as a cure for neuralgia and rheumatism, advanced last year in the Times, by Mr. Gibson Ward. Now if you notice people who suffer from neuralgia, you will see they are generally those of an electrical or neutral type, whose magnetism is therefore deficient in quantity or quality. Celery being grown, covered from sun or light, in plenty of fresh earth, must absorb a quantity of magnetism, and its curative qualities are, no doubt, owing to this fact. Mud baths, also given abroad for neuralgia, are only fresh earth taken from the moor, and mixed with water, in which the patient lies for half an hour. Ploughmen are proverbially healthy, and we must not forget that Jesus Christ made use of clay to heal the blind man.
A Spaniard thinks nothing of walking 40 miles in a day, although his only food be bread, onions, and fresh water. I think, therefore, in this respect, we may venture to differ from some occultists, particularly when we see how the tendency of the age is to develope the brain, at the expense of the body. There is one more way by which Nature is nourished, and that is through the skin, which is not only an organ of excretion, but of absorption. Were all the pores of the skin stopped, we should die, though we might have many cubic feet of fresh air to breathe through the lungs. We see, therefore, how very necessary it is that the skin should be kept in good order. A Turkish bath once or twice a week, is much to be recommended, also to <... continues on page 10-290 >
* With all respect to the authoress of the paper, we believe that there is not an atom of evidence that electricity or magnetism has any of the purely imaginary powers ascribed to them in this paragraph.— Ed. of Spiritualist.
† This is not a fact,— Ed.