Theosophy
Sir,—There is something divinely tender in the heart of woman, notwithstanding any hard mode of thinking in which she may have been brought up, or, may be, led to study; the quality of mercy is not easily strangled in her, spite of any drawback, I had almost said, even at the expense of her logic. And so Madame Blavatsky tells us, in The Spiritualist of Feb. 8th, “That man must be indeed a true animal who has not, after death, a spark of the divine ruach, or nous, left in him to allow him a chance of self-salvation.” These words, after the hard matter of fact inference of the loss of trinity of all physical mediums, and the certain alleged future “annihilation” of the elementaries, their familiars, come upon us softly as the summer breezes, and are more precious than rubies when they proceed from the heart. But are they in conformity with occultism, as generally interpreted by her-self? Is not Madame Blavatsky here, and occasionally elsewhere, like some Calvinistic minister whose soul-power occasionally steals a march upon his will, and now and again forces him, in conformity with divine law, to emit some hopeful words in behalf of humanity at large, which he will, however, take care never to “nail’t wi’ Scripture,” though, in truth, it might be done, and even can be done more effectually by Madame Blavatsky with her Buddhism. For ourselves, we cannot conceive a spark of a spark. A man’s spirit is, indeed, a spark of the Divine Spirit, at least so we believe; but it will not cut up; we must, as Col. Olcott shows, retain the whole God-given spark, not a spark of it; or, if it be possible, as he thinks, lose it altogether, or lose it altogether for a very long time. But, then, he shows it will, in the latter case, return in full, as it leaves in full. It may be useful to talk of a spark of a spark just now, when the English Spiritualists have heard for the first time of that very unscientific but disheartening problem of man’s annihilation, put before them gravely, and the survival of the fittest brought in evidence of the same; forgetting that science teaches us nothing can be lost, though new combinations accrue, and that which is unfit to-day may, by evolution, be rendered fit hereafter; and that which is lost be found. Does not Colonel Olcott say in The Spiritualist of December 7th, “The astral man, or double or soul” that is, a soul which has lost its Divine νους; in other words, a spiritless soul, “freed from physical imprisonment, is followed by the consequences of his earthly deeds, thoughts, and desires: he either becomes purged of the last traces of earthly grossness, and, finally, after an incalculable lapse of time, is joined (rejoined) to his Divine spirit, and lives for ever as an entity, or, having been completely debased on earth, he sinks deeper and deeper into matter, and is annihilated?” In both the above cases, according to Colonel Olcott, the astral man, or mere “soul,” has lost his Divine spirit altogether. There is nothing here about a spark of it being left, as Madame Blavatsky puts it, “after death,” and, “usually” the Colonel adds, “the separation of soul and spirit occurs before the bodily death.” If man be a Trinity, which I believe he is, and if he, can lose more than the one of these parts, that he does lose, I mean, the body, that part must go entirely, as the body goes at death. And, indeed, while the body is alive, it will not bear cutting up, certainly not the better portions, which the spirit and soul make use of for reasoning purposes; and if the body survives with the loss of a limb, the soul body remains in toto, and it is said that if the stump of an amputated limb is placed against a wall, the soul leg is felt to pass through the wall, showing that the latter will not bear the loss even of a limb; and the soul body is higher than the body of flesh, how then can the spirit, which is higher still, suffer loss?
But here we are met by another occultist difficulty, a new spoke which they have put in their own wheel, which refutes the theory of Madame Blavatsky, that of the soul of man retaining at death a portion of the Divine spark which was once his in its entirety, as a man; as well as it refutes the idea expressed by Col. Olcott, of the soul losing the Divine spirit altogether, as a rule, before death, and retaining no portion of it whatever; in other words, man losing the only valuable part of his trinity before he dies, often many years before he dies. This third and different assumption, which is in flat contradiction to both the above diverse views of Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott, emanates from “a very learned occultist,” quoted by Mr. C. C. Massey in The Spiritualist of March 16th, 1876, who shows, unlike the others, that all matter of every desorption is imbued throughout every atom with the Divine spirit. Consequently, the soul, or astral man, with living body or without it, the soul, I say, being matter, is imbued throughout with the Divine spirit, simply because it is matter, if for no better reason, however evil or good it may be. And this third diverse occultist doctrine is also fatal to the astonishing speculation that infants and idiots are without the Divine spirit. Here is what this “learned occultist” teaches us: “The Hermetist, who sees with both eyes, instead of with one only, observes that each atom, no matter where found, is imbued with that vital principle, called spirit. Thus each grain of sand, equally with each minutest atom of the human body, has its inherent latent spark of the Divine light.” How then can a man lose this Divine light, in part or in whole, “as a rule, before death,” if each minutest atom of the human body has its inherent latent spark of the Divine light? I must add that I think some of the ideas of the modern occultists might surprise an average Buddhist as much as they do a Spiritualist—I say nothing of an average occultist. None are so ultramontane as the new converts; they perfectly surprise the good people on the other side of the Alps. And so true is the Darwinian principle of the natural fight for predominance of the “fittest,” we must not say elbowing for the high seats of the synagogue, that I should never be surprised if we should find, not only elemental spirits, but elementaries following suit. What else causes the tendency to condemn, no matter to what abysmal depths, those whom men or spirits consider a little lower than themselves. And to such a pitch has this uncharitableness arrived that we are constrained to murmur, with our great poet—
In religion, |
Spiritless Souls
Sir,—It is curious to learn from Mr. C. C. Massey, as a Theosophist, that, whereas in March 1876, an “elementary” meant “the rudimentary spiritual being in process of evolution into humanity,” which, “when it dies out of one state of existence, is born into a higher one,” yet that now, in January, 1878, an “elementary’’ means, “a departed and earth-born soul, a creature of the elements in whom the human spirit has no part.” But the “astral man,” or the “soul,” according to Colonel Olcott, has also lost his spirit; and the “elementary,” at any rate up to a certain point, is an astral man. Here is shortly Colonel Olcott’s definition of the two: “The astral man (or double or soul), freed from physical imprisonment, is followed by the consequences of his earthly deeds, thoughts, and desires. He either becomes purged of the last traces of earthly grossness, and finally, after an incalculable lapse of time, is joined or rejoined to his divine spirit, and lives for ever as an entity; or this astral man having been completely debased on earth, sinks deeper and deeper into matter, and is annihilated. Usually the separation of soul and spirit occurs before the bodily death; this is the rule, but still there are exceptions.” Colonel Olcott’s second definition depicts the “elementary.” He, she, or it is doomed, anyhow. “Having been completely debased on earth,” he, she or it is to be “annihilated.” But we must remember that the “elementary, as a rule,” loses the spirit while he is a man. So, while he is living, a living man, and he may remain a long time on earth before he dies, there is no distinguishing him from any other’s “soul,” “double” or “astral man.” In short, he is one; and it must be a dainty speculation for the Theosophists to look round among their old acquaintance, and meditate on which are to be elementaries, and which only astrals. What I, however, now desire to point out, is this new discrepancy in our teachers. They have already, within the last two years, entirely changed the meaning of the, to them, important word, “elementary; and now, while Mr. Massey confines the present designation of “elementary’’ to a “departed soul,” Colonel Olcott shows him up as a living man; indeed, very living and indistinguishable from an astral man, and, truly, for that matter, indistinguishable, perhaps, in outward appearance from even an irreproachable Theosophist of the inner ring. And yet, notwithstanding the above dogma of his chief, Mr. Massey reads me this lecture. He says: “True, man, as man, never loses his trinity, that is, so long as he continues a man; and it is, perhaps, partly to guard against any apparent inconsistency, that when he has lost his trinity he is designated no longer man, but elementary, a creature of the elements, in whom the human spirit has no part.”
What! Does Mr. Massey mean to say that, since the spirit is said to be lost, “as a rule,” during life, and the trinity consequently lost, that a man is to be no longer designated man when he is still in the flesh? But if he is to be designated no longer man, why does Colonel Olcott call him “astral man,” when he has lost his trinity? Really, if Mr. Massey’s object is not to throw a mask over the extreme opinions of his chief, in mitigation thereof, as being just a little ashamed of such outrageous ideas, I fear he has got himself into a difficulty on his own account. For to tell a man in the flesh that he is no man, merely because one has got an idea, however false it may be, that he has lost his trinity, is a somewhat unreasonable and, so to speak, a feminine aspersion. It is better to say, “Sir, you have lost your trinity, and are no gentleman.” One might then be understood, and be taken up or put down as the case might be, just as the Theosophists take up and put down the divine spirit of man. Lord Beaconsfield says “man is divine.” Really, now that former Spiritualists have grown so narrow and Calvinistic, they might well take a lesson from the more liberal in the churches, and read Canon Farrar’s sermons, now so much in vogue, especially that or those which filled the ancient Abbey of Westminster, with the unwonted sound, perhaps, even in that favoured fane of “Eternal Hope.” The sermons are published by Macmillan, under that gracious title, and may be recommended as an antidote to Colonel Olcott. They are creating a great sensation, and never would or could have been preached with impunity, had it not been for the elevating, tolerant force of Spiritualism, which has been leavening society unseen for the last thirty years, has been sent as a messenger to prepare the way for mercifulness in the churches, and has already made too much headway to be swamped by the Theosophists, or any other its whatever.
But what are we scholars to understand, when we find so much discrepancy in details among the Theosophists, and so much self-contradiction in the exponents of the doctrines taught by them, concerning this mistified, mixed, and elementary subject of “elementaries”? What but to concur, at any rate, most heartily in what Col. Olcott has himself most aptly and truly testified concerning them, that “so much has been said of them with so little understanding”? What, indeed, are we to understand? and yet on this new-fangled and ill-defined term “elementary,” not yet two years old? on an idea entirely novel in Europe and America, we are called upon, with the utmost effrontery, to condemn to an impossible destiny, that of “annihilation,” or at least to punishment for “an incalculable lapse of time,” a vast number of living men and women, and all physical mediums, who, for aught we know, <... continues on page 4-224 >
Editor's notes
London Spiritualist, No. 287, February 22, 1878, p. 92