< Madame Blavatsky on “The Himalayan Brothers.” (continued from page 11-198) >
authoritative throughout, and too full of insulting aspersions against those who are not yet proved to be worse or lower than himself; and fails entirely to carry conviction to the minds of the profane as of those who do know something of adepts and initiates—that it is one of such proficients who now addresses them. Styling himself an adept, whose “Hierophant is a western gentleman,” but a few lines further on he confesses his utter ignorance of the existence of a body which cannot possibly be ignored by any true adept! I say “cannot” for there is no accepted neophyte on the whole globe but at least knows of the Himalayan Fraternity. The sanction to receive the last and supreme initiation, the real “word at low breath” can come but through those fraternities in Egypt, India, and Thibet to one of which belongs “Koot Hoomi Lal Singh.” True, there is “adept” and adept, and they differ, as there are adepts in more than one art and science. I, for one, know in America of a shoemaker, who advertised himself as “an adept in the high art of manufacturing Parisian cothurns.” J. K. speaks of Brothers “on the soul plane” of “divine Kabbalah culminating in God” of “slave magic” and so on, a phraseology which proves to me most conclusively that he is but one of those dabblers in western occultism which were so well represented some years ago, by French-born “Egyptians” “and Algerians” who told people their fortune by the Tarot, and placed their visitors within enchanted circles with a Tetragrammaton inscribed in the centre. I do not say J. K. is one of the latter, I beg him to understand. Though quite unknown to me and hiding behind his two initials I will not follow his rude example and insult him for all that. But I say and repeat that his language sadly betrays him. If a Kabbalist at all, then himself and his “Hierophant” are but the humble self-taught pupils of the mediaeval, and so-called “Christian” Kabbalists; of adepts, who, like Agrippa, Kunrath, Paracelsus, Vaughan, Robert Fludd and several others, revealed their knowledge to the world but to better conceal it, and who never gave the key to it in their writings. He bombastically asserts his own knowledge and power, and proceeds to pass judgment on people of whom he knows and can know nothing. Of the “Brothers” he says: “If they are true adepts they have not shown much worldly wisdom, and the organization which is to inculcate their doctrine is a complete failure, for even the very first psychical and physical principles of true theosophy and occult science are quite unknown to and unpractised by the members of that organization—the Theosophical Society.”
How does he know? Did the Theosophists take him into their confidence? And if he knows something of the British Theosophical Society what can he know of those in India? If he belongs to any of them, then does he play false to the whole body and is a traitor. And if he does not, what has he to say of its practitioners, since the Society in general and especially its esoteric sections that count but a very few “chosen ones”—are secret bodies?
The more attentively I read his article the more am I inclined to laugh at the dogmatic tone prevailing in it. Were I a Spiritualist I would be inclined to suspect in it a good “goak” of John King, whose initials are represented in the signature of J. K. Let him first learn, that mirific Brother of the “Western Hermetic Circle in the soul-plane,” a few facts about the adepts in general, before he renders himself any more ridiculous.
(1) No true adept will on any consideration whatever reveal himself as one, to the profane. Nor would he ever speak in such terms of contempt of people, who are certainly no more silly, and, in many an instance, far wiser than himself. But were even the Theosophists the poor misled creatures he would represent them to be, a true adept would rather help than deride them.
(2) There never was a true Initiate but knew of the secret Fraternities in the East. It is not Eliphas Levi who would ever deny their existence, since we have his authentic signature to the contrary. Even P. B. Randolph, that wondrous, though erratic, genius of America, that half-initiated seer, who got his knowledge in the East, had good reasons to know of their actual existence, as his writings can prove.
(3) One who ever perorates upon his occult knowledge, and speaks of practising hie powers in the name of some particular prophet, deity, or Avatar, is but a sectarian mystic at best. He cannot be an adept in the Eastern sense—a Mahatma, for his judgment will always be biassed and prejudiced by the colouring of his own special and dogmatic religion.
(4) The great science, called by the vulgar “magic,” and by its Eastern proficients Gupta Vidya, embracing as it does each and every science, since it is the acme of knowledge, and constitutes the perfection of philosophy, is universal: hence—as very truly remarked— cannot be confined to one particular nation or geographical locality. But, as Truth is one, the method for the attainment of its highest proficiency must necessarily be also one. It cannot be subdivided, for, once reduced to parts, each of them, left to itself, will, like rays of light, diverge from, instead of converging to, its centre, the ultimate goal of knowledge; and these parts can re-become the Whole only by collecting them together again, or each fraction will remain but a fraction. This truism, which may be termed elementary mathematics for little boys, has to be re-called, in order to refresh the memory of such “adepts” as are too apt to forget that “Christian Kabbalism” is but a fraction of Universal Occult Science. And, if they believe that they have nothing more to learn, then the less they turn to “Eastern Adepts” for information the better and the less trouble for both. There is but one royal road to “Divine Magic;” neglect and abandon it to devote yourself specially to one of the paths diverging from it, and like a lonely wanderer you will find yourself lost in an inextricable labyrinth. Magic, I suppose, existed milleniums before the Christian era: and, if so, are we to think then, with our too learned friends, the modem “Western Kabbalists,” that it was all Black Magic, practised by the “Old firm of Devil & Co.”? But together with every other person who knows something of what he or she talks about, I say that it is nothing of the kind; that J. K. seems to be superbly ignorant even of the enormous difference which exists between a Kabbalist and an Occultist. Is he aware, or not, that the Kabbalist stands, in relation to the Occultist, as a little detached hill at the foot of the Himalayas, to Mount Everest? That what is known as the Jewish Kabala of Simon Ben Jochai, is already thew disfigured version of its primitive source the Great Chaldean Book of Numbers? That as the former, with its adaption to the Jewish Dispensation, its mixed international Angeology and Demonology, its Oriphiels and Raphaels and Greek Tetragrams, is a pale copy of the Chaldean, so the Kabbala of the Christian Alchemists and Rosicrucians is nought in its turn but a tortured edition of the Jewish. By centralizing the Occult Power and his course of actions, in some one national God or Avatar, whether in Jehovah or Christ, Brahma or Mahomet, the Kabbalist diverges the more from the one central Truth. It is but the Occultist, the Eastern adept, who stands a Free Man, omnipotent through its own Divine Spirit as <... continues on page 11-200 >