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{{Style P-HPB SB. Title continued |Isis Unveiled|4-80}}
{{Style P-HPB SB. Title continued |Isis Unveiled|4-80}}


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{{Style P-No indent|extracts from the Kabala, the Hermetic tablets, the Vedas and sacred books of
the Persians and Buddhists, as well as of the Grecian and Ionian philosophy and
of sages of the mediæval period, are thus interspersed through the work—often,
however, to be criticised and corrected. She has made the Chaldean of the
pre-Abrahamic period live again; and, what is hard for us to believe, insists
that he was of the Aryan or Indo-European race and the disciple of Bramin sages
of Upper India. But the oldest faith—we can hardly call it a worship—she
declares to have been the religion of wisdom. In this she confirms the
assertions of the Alexandrian Eclectics and their modern followers. The great
world religion, now known as Buddhism, is, accordingly, in her view, the most
ancient and, with all its adulterations, the truest of any. She professes to
know its arcane doctrines, and regards them as not only antedating the Vedic,
Bramin and Mazdean theologies, but as comprising the sublimer revelation of the
mysteries and the principal philosophical dogmas of the West. Others have not
learned this, because they did not possess the key. The religious and scientific
wealth of the oldest peoples of the earth has been so jealously guarded from
inquisitorial foreigners by mysteries of jargon that the many have denied the
existence of anything worth seeing, and the few have been so discouraged by the
obstacles in the road that, for the most part, they have abandoned the
undertaking. But men do not for so many centuries perform the rites and accept
the ordinances of a religion that is merely a farce.}}
 
“Isis” everywhere asserts the antiquity of the older peoples and doctrines. Many
efforts have been made to show the laws of Manu and the Aryan conquest of
Hindostan to be almost within the confines of modern history. The Mahabharata
and Ramagana have been declared post-Christian. But further knowledge of Hindoo
methods of recording time is disproving that evolution as well as emanation and
even the positive and molecular philosophies were taught beside the Himalayas.
Telegraphs, and even telephones, seem to have been older than history. “Seventy
thousand years of experience” in an indefinite number of cycles are cited in
demonstration. But the book is not all dry logic or tedious philosopheme. The
author is too true to the laws of her sex not to be sprightly or vivacious, and
even capable of stinging invective. She outdoes the “Arabian Nights’
Entertainments” in marvelous story; and, while denying supernatural miracles,
she does not hesitate to relate occurrences that surpass the capacity of faith
usually possessed by mankind. Like Parclus and Paracelsus, she peoples the mid
air with spiritual existences, elemental and elementary, good, bad, and
indifferent. They can be evoked by music and peculiar vapors, and then made to
reveal secrets or run on errands. Magic and necromancy are no fictions. There
have been, there now are men who can “conjure down the moon.” It is no
impossibility to manufacture gold, as Raymond Lully did for Edward III. Roger
Bacon disclosed spiritual scenes to human view. These are common matters in
Oriental countries, and the madam describes several which she herself witnessed.
However skeptical we may be in many respects she is confident and sincere. From
God the Universal Mind to Nirvana, the final bliss, there is no marvel that she
does not believe. Vampires, the dead or cataleptic absorbing vitality from the
living, the virtue of fresh-spilt blood to attract spirits, the possibility of
re-incarnation and of losing the soul-life as described by Bulwer-Lytton, the
power of inflicting mortal injury by cutting out the bowels and then healing the
hurt by the mysterious Akâsa, the prolonging of life for centuries, are a few of
the topics introduced and illustrated as actual facts. One who reads the book
carefully through ought to know everything of the marvelous and mystical,
except, perhaps, the passwords.
 
“Isis” will supplement the Anacalypsis. Whoever loves to read Godfrey Higgins
will be delighted with Mme. Blavatsky. There is a great resemblance between
their works. Both have tried hard to tell everything apocryphal and apocalyptic.
It is easy to forecast the reception of this book. With its striking
peculiarities, its audacity, its versatility and the prodigious variety of
subjects which it notices and handles, it is one of the remarkable productions
of the century.




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