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- 6. . . . . Then the Second Seven, who are the Lipika, produced by the three (Word, Voice, and Spirit). The rejected Son is One, the “ Son-Suns ” are countless.
The Lipi-ka, from the word lipi, “ writing,” means literally the
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“ Scribes.” * Mystically, these Divine Beings are connected with Karma, the Law of Retribution, for they are the Recorders or Annalists who impress on the (to us) invisible tablets of the Astral Light, “ the great picture-gallery of eternity ” — a faithful record of every act, and even thought, of man, of all that was, is, or ever will be, in the phenomenal Universe. As said in “ Isis,” this divine and unseen canvas is the Book of Life. As it is the Lipika who project into objectivity from the passive Universal Mind the ideal plan of the universe, upon which the “ Builders ” reconstruct the Kosmos after every Pralaya, it is they who stand parallel to the Seven Angels of the Presence, whom the Christians recognise in the Seven “ Planetary Spirits ” or the “ Spirits of the Stars ; ” for thus it is they who are the direct amanuenses of the Eternal Ideation — or, as called by Plato, the “ Divine Thought.” The Eternal Record is no fantastic dream, for we meet with the same records in the world of gross matter. “ A shadow never falls upon a wall without leaving thereupon a permanent trace which might be made visible by resorting to proper processes,” says Dr. Draper. . . . “ The portraits of our friends or landscapeviews may be hidden on the sensitive surface from the eye, but they are ready to make their appearance as soon as proper developers are resorted to. A spectre is concealed on a silver or a glassy surface, until, by our necromancy, we make it come forth into the visible world. Upon the walls of our most private apartments, where we think the eye of intrusion is altogether shut out, and our retirement can never be profaned, there exist the vestiges of all our acts, silhouettes of whatever we have done.” † Drs. Jevons and Babbage believe that every thought, displacing the particles of the brain and setting them in motion, scatters them throughout the Universe, and they think that “ each particle of the existing matter must be a register of all that has happened.” (Principles of Science, Vol. II. p. 455.) Thus the ancient doctrine has begun to acquire rights of citizenship in the speculations of the scientific world.
The forty “ Assessors ” who stand in the region of Amenti as the accusers of the Soul before Osiris, belong to the same class of deities as the Lipika, and might stand paralleled, were not the Egyptian gods so
* These are the four “ Immortals ” which are mentioned in Atharva Veda as the “ Watchers ” or Guardians of the four quarters of the sky (see ch. lxxvi., 1-4, et seq.).
† “ Conflict between Religion and Science.” — Draper, pp. 132 and 133.
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little understood in their esoteric meaning. The Hindu Chitra-Gupta who reads out the account of every Soul’s life from his register, called Agra-Sandhani ; the “ Assessors ” who read theirs from the heart of the defunct, which becomes an open book before (whether) Yama, Minos, Osiris, or Karma — are all so many copies of, and variants from the Lipika, and their Astral Records. Nevertheless, the Lipi-ka are not deities connected with Death, but with Life Eternal.
Connected as the Lipika are with the destiny of every man and the birth of every child, whose life is already traced in the Astral Light — not fatalistically, but only because the future, like the past, is ever alive in the present — they may also be said to exercise an influence on the Science of Horoscopy. We must admit the truth of the latter whether we will or not. For, as observed by one of the modern adepts of Astrology, “ Now that photography has revealed to us the chemical influence of the Sidereal system, by fixing on the sensitized plate of the apparatus milliards of stars and planets that had hitherto baffled the efforts of the most powerful telescopes to discover them, it becomes easier to understand how our solar system can, at the birth of a child, influence his brain — virgin of any impression — in a definite manner and according to the presence on the zenith of such or another zodiacal constellation.” †
† Les Mystères de l’Horoscope, p. XI.