< Manifestations in the Far East (continued from page 11-139) >
In Mr. Sinnett’s book we can find no test manifestations, which might not possibly have been also producible through the mediumship of Mrs. Jencken or Mrs. Guppy-Volckman, under precisely the same conditions.
Primitive Man
I have again and again re-read Mr. Podmore’s critique on Mr. Denton’s last work, trying to satisfy myself as to his full meaning, and still doubt whether I can have understood it aright. In the last part of it he says, “Each new discovery of science only makes it the more certain that the whole order of phenomena” (in the world of nature, including man) “is one order.” Can he really think so, when even in the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms the perfect result of evolution is only obtained by influence external to the developing matter? For instance, the diamond reaches its perfection of crystallisation by what we call natural laws, but the hand of man must overrule the natural eclipse of its radiancy, removing obstructions and polishing its facets; so again with the wild apple tree, a crude and hardly palatable fruit is all it can by its own nature produce, till the luxuriant growth of that nature is pruned away and a better nature en grafted; so with the horse,—the law of the survival of the fittest will doubtless make a strong and beautiful creature, but for the powers of a race-horse no mere evolution of growth will suffice: there must be training from a superior nature. Is that training of the same order?
But instead of putting questions which may only betray my ignorant misconception of the scope of Mr. Podmore’s argument, I will gratefully report the relief of mind which I gained as to the Darwinian theory of man’s origin, from the following passages in Madame Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled.
“Modern, or so called exact science, holds but to a one-sided physical evolution,”... I “the ancient sages, ascending to the unknowable, made their starting point from the first manifestation of the unseen, the unavoidable, and from a strict logical reasoning, the absolutely necessary creative Being, the Demiurgos of the universe. Evolution began with them from pure spirit, which descending lower and lower down, assumed at last a visible and comprehensible form, and became matter. Arrived at this point, they speculated in the Darwinian method but on a far more large and comprehensive basis.” (Isis Unveiled, vol. I, page 31 of preface).
“The first ideas of men were spiritual, and their protoplastic bodies were not composed of the gross and material substances of which we see them composed now-a-days. The first men were created with all the faculties of the Deity, and powers far transcending those of the angelic host; for they were the direct emanations of Adam Kadmon, the primitive man, the macrocosm; while the present humanity is several degrees removed even from the earthly Adam, who was the microcosm, or ‘the little world:’”... “hence, man was intended from the first to be a being of both a progressive and retrogressive nature. Beginning at the apex of the Divine cycle, he gradually began receding from, the centre of light, acquiring at every new and lower sphere of being (worlds each inhabited by a different race of human beings)”—one longs to ask and be told whence they are supposed to have come; are they truly human, or only prefigurations of man?—“a more solid physical form, and losing a portion of his divine faculties.” (Ibid, vol. 2, page 276). From this passage to the end of the chapter is well worth careful study, but much too long for quotation.
How entirely this assertion as to the previous descent of man, agrees with what Mr. T. Lake Harris tells of the three births of the human spirit before it begins the slow ascent that accompanies physical development. It is, I think, in his Arcana of Christianity that he speaks of the progressive experience of man— a thought of God—first born in the celestial heavens, and after that in the spiritual, and lastly in what he calls—following Swedenborg —the ultimate heaven, finding there what the elder seer terms his “continent in ultimates.” This epoch, according to Madame Blavatsky’s teaching would be, I suppose, that which immediately preceded “becoming matter,” but the transition seems impossibly abrupt; and my own puzzle in this inscrutably dark region of thought hangs unsolved on just that point; did true humanity unite itself with the fully evolved animal man, or was it in the first primordial germ of that slowly matured creature? It has seemed to me far more possible that what in Scripture is called God’s breathing into man the breath of life, indicates the process of transfer, so to speak, from a transmundane life to one in which material limitations obscured memory of that life, but by means of those very limitations stimulated to spiritual expansion in the mixed world, and that only when first the animal man was sufficiently organized for the spiritual man to energize by its means: for structural preparation is, we see, needed for bringing to light perfection in every class of beings, yet when I turn to Sabre D’Olivet’s Cosmogonie de Moyse, no mean authority in such matters, though so little known even to scholarly people, I am at a loss for a consistent theory. I find in his translation of Genesis, chap, i, v. 26, 27, these deeply significant words:*
“Il avait dit sui les Dieux, nous ferons Adam, l’homme universal **** afin que, puissance collective, il tienne universellement l’empire, et domine a la fois, et dans le poisson des mers, et dans l’oiseau des cieux, et dans le quadruple, et dans toute l’animalitd, et dans toute la vie reptiforme se mouvant sur la terre: et sui l’Etre des etres avait cree l’existence potentielle d’Adam, l’homme universel,” etc. etc. And again in verse 5 of chap. ii, “L'universel Adam n'existait point encore en substance actuelle pour ellaborer et servir l’element Adamique.”†
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* I give Sabre D'Olivet’s own literal translation from the Hebrew original. “And he said, He—the Gods, we will make Adam in the shadow of us, by the like-making-like ourselves, and they shall rule, they, Adam, the universal man, in the spawn breeding-kind of the Beas, and in the flying kind of the heavens, and in the quadrupedly walking kind, and in the whole earth-born life, and in all moving things crawling along upon the earth.”— Chap, i, verse 26.
“And Adam (the collective man) not being existing to labour the Adamic self-sameness (homogeneal ground).” Chap.2, ver. 5. The French version quoted is his own paraphrase for rendering literal translation intelligible.
† “And he formed (framed, elementised for an everlasting end) Jhoah, He the Being-of-beings, the self-sameness of Adam, the collective man, by rarefying (sublimating the principle) of the Adamich ground; and he inspired into the inspiring faculty of him a being exalted (an essence) of the lives, for being made Adam(the collective man) according to the soul of life,’—Genesis, chap ii, ver. 7. Cosmogony of Moses.
Editor's notes
- ↑ Primitive Man by Penny, A.J., London Spiritualist, No. 463, July 8, 1881, pp. 15-7
Sources
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London Spiritualist, No. 463, July 8, 1881, pp. 15-7