Kabbalistic Views on "Spirits" As Propagated by the Theosophical Society
Editor Journal – Dear Sir,—I must beg you to again allow me a little space for the further elucidation of a very important question—that of the “Elementals” and the “Elementaries.” It is a misfortune that our European languages do not contain a nomenclature expressive of the various grades and conditions of spiritual beings. But surely I cannot be blamed for either the above linguistic deficiency, or because some people do not choose or are unable to understand my meaning! I cannot too often repeat that in this matter I claim no originality. My teachings are but the substance of what many kabalists have said before me, which, today, I mean to prove with your kind permission.
I am accused (1) of “turning somersaults” and jumping from one idea to another. The defendant pleads not guilty. (2) Of coining not only words, but philosophies out of the depths of my consciousness: defendant enters the same plea. (3) Of having repeatedly asserted that “intelligent spirits other than those who have passed through an earth experience in a human body were concerned in the manifestations known as the phenomena of Spiritualism:” true, and defendant repeats the assertion. (4) Of having advanced, in my bold and unwarranted theories, “beyond the great Eliphas Lévi himself.” Indeed? Were I to go even as far as he (see his La Science des Esprits), I would deny that a single so-called spiritual manifestation is more than hallucination, produced by soulless Elementals, whom he calls “Elementary.” (See Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie.)
I am asked, “What proof is there of the existence of the elementals?” In my turn, I will inquire, what proof is there of “diakkas,” “guides,” “bands,” and “controls”? And yet these terms are all current among Spiritualists. The unanimous testimony of innumerable observers and competent experimenters furnishes the proof. If Spiritualists cannot or will not go to those countries where they are living, and these proofs are accessible, they, at least, have no right to give the lie direct to those who have seen both the adepts and the proofs. My witnesses are living men, teaching and, exemplifying the philosophy of hoary ages; theirs, these very “guides” and “controls” who, up to the present time, are at best hypothetical, and whose assertions have been repeatedly found, by Spiritualists themselves, contradictory and false.
If my present critics insist that since the discussion of this matter began a disembodied soul has never been described as an “elementary,” I merely point to the number of the London Spiritualist for February 18th, 1876, published nearly two years ago, in which a correspondent, who has certainly studied occult sciences, says: “Is it not probable that some of the elementary spirits of an evil type are those spirit-bodies which, only recently disembodied, are on the eve of an eternal dissolution, and which continue their temporary existence only by vampirizing those still in the flesh? They had existence; they never attained to being.” Note two things: that human elementaries are recognized as existing, apart from the gnomes, sylphs, undines and salamanders—beings purely elemental; and that annihilation of the soul is regarded as potential.
Says Paracelsus, in his Philosophia Saga, “The current of astral light with its peculiar inhabitants, gnomes, sylphs, etc., is transformed into human light at the moment of the conception, and it becomes the first envelope of the soul—its grosser portion; combined with the most subtle fluids, it forms the sidereal (astral, or ethereal) phantom—the inner man.”* And Éliphas Lévi: “The astral light is saturated with souls which it discharges in the incessant generation of beings . . . At the birth of a child, they influence the four temperaments of the latter—the element of the gnomes predominates in melancholy persons; of the salamanders in the sanguine; of the undines, in the phlegmatic; of the sylphs, in the giddy and bilious. . . . These are the spirits which we designate under the term of occult elements.” (Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, Vol. II, chapter on the conjuration of the four classes of elementaries.) “Yes, yes,” he remarks (in Vol. I, op. cit., p. 164), “these spirits of the elements do exist. Some wandering in their spheres, others trying to incarnate themselves, others again already incarnated and living on earth. These are vicious and imperfect men.”
Note that we have here described to us more or less “intelligent spirits other than those who have passed through an earth experience in a human body.” If not intelligent, they would not know how to make the attempt to incarnate themselves. Vicious elementals, or elementaries, are attracted to vicious parents; they bask in their atmosphere, and are thus afforded the chance by the vices of the parents to perpetuate in the child the paternal wickedness. The unintellectual “elementals” are draw in unconsciously to themselves; and in the order of nature, as component parts of the grosser astral body or soul, determine the temperament. They can as little resist as the animalcules can avoid entering into our bodies in the water we swallow. Of a third class, out of hundreds that the Eastern philosophers and kabalists are acquainted with, Éliphas Lévi, discussing spiritistic phenomena, says: “They are neither the souls of the damned nor guilty; the elementary spirits are like children curious and harmless, and torment people in proportion as attention is paid to them.” These he regards as the sole agents in all the meaningless and useless physical phenomena at séances. Such phenomena will be produced unless they be dominated “by wills more powerful than their own.” Such a will may be that of a living adept, or as there are none such at Western spiritual séances, these ready agents are at the disposal of every strong, vicious, earth-bound, human elementary who has been attracted to the place. By such they can be used in combination with the astral emanations of the circle and medium, as stuff out of which to make materialized spirits.
So little does Lévi concede the possibility of spirit-return in objective form, that he says: “The good deceased come back in our dreams; the state of mediumism is an extension of dream, it is somnambulism in all its variety and ecstasies. Fathom the phenomenon of sleep and you will understand the phenomena of the spirits”; and again: “According to one of the great dogmas of the kabala, the spirit despoils itself in order to ascend, and thus would have to reclothe itself to descend. There is but one way for a spirit already liberated to manifest itself again on earth—it must get back into its body and resurrect. This is quite another thing from hiding under a table or a hat. That is why necromancy is horrible. It constitutes a crime against nature. . . . We have admitted in our former works the possibility of vampirism, and even tried to explain it. The phenomena now actually occurring in America and Europe unquestionably belong to this fearful malady. . . The mediums do not, it is true, eat the flesh of corpses [like one Sergeant Bertrand], but they breathe in throughout their whole nervous organism the phosphoric emanations of putrefied corpses, or spectral light. They are not vampires, but they evoke vampires. For this reason, they are nearly all debilitated and sick.” (Science des Esprits, 258).
Do those in Europe and America, who have heretofore described the cadaverous odor that, in some cases, they have noticed as attending materialized spirits, appreciate the revolting significance of the above explanation?
Henry Khunrath was a most learned kabalist, and the greatest authority among mediaeval occultists. He gives, in one of the clavicles of his Amphitheatrum Sapientiœ Æternœ, illustrative engravings of the four great classes of elementary spirits, as they presented themselves during an evocation of ceremonial magic, before the eyes of the magus, when, after passing the threshold, he lifts the “Veil of Isis.” In describing them, Khunrath corroborates Éliphas Lévi. He tells us they are disembodied, vicious men, who have parted with their divine spirits and become elementary. They are so termed, “because attracted by the earthly atmosphere, and are surrounded by the earth’s elements.” Here Khunrath applies the term “elementary” to human doomed souls, while Lévi uses it, as we have seen, to designate another class of the same great family—gnomes, sylphs, undines, etc.—sub-human entities.
I have before me a manuscript, intended originally for publication but withheld for various reasons. The author signs himself “Zeus,” and is a kabalist of more than twenty-five years’ standing. This experienced occultist, a zealous devotee of Khunrath, expounding the doctrine of the latter, also says that the kabalists divided the spirits of the elements into four classes corresponding to the four temperaments in man.
It is charged against me as a heinous offense that I aver that some men lose their souls and are annihilated. But this last-named authority, “Zeus,” is equally culpable, for he says, “They (the kabalists) taught that man’s spirit descended from the great ocean of spirit, and is therefore, per se, pure and divine; but its soul or capsule, through the (allegorical) fall of Adam, <... continues on page 4-150 >
Editor's notes
- ↑ Kabbalistic Views on "Spirits" As Propagated by the Theosophical Society by Blavatsky H.P., Religio–Philosophical Journal, January 26, 1878. Text was copied from katinkahesselink.net and needs to be proofread against original newspaper text.
This is published in “Modern Panarion”, p. 152 as a Kabbalistic Views on "Spirits". – Archivist