Blavatsky H.P. - Have Animals Souls: Difference between revisions

  | alternatives = [http://www.katinkahesselink.net/blavatsky/articles/v7/y1886_001.htm KH], [https://www.blavatsky.net/index.php/have-animals-souls B], [https://theosophytrust.org/430-have-animals-souls TS], [https://universaltheosophy.com/hpb/have-animals-souls/ UT]

{{HPB-CW-comment|[This remarkable article is mentioned by H.P.B. in a letter she wrote to A. P. Sinnett from Würzburg, Germany. The letter is undated. Mary K. Neff provisionally dates it as of November, 1885. It was originally published in The Letters of H. P. Blavatsky to A. P. Sinnett (New York: Frederick A. Stokes; London: T. Fisher Unwin Ltd., 1925), pp. 243-244. It begins with the following words: “ Sent to Mohini art: ‘Have animals Souls’ to correct. Ask him to bring it to you and see pp. he was told to show to you. There you shall find in the Sishtas (or remnants) spoken how near the truth came our mutual friend A.P.S. in his ‘Noah’s Ark Theory’.” While it may not be possible any longer to ascertain the correct date when this article was written, it is safe to assume that it must have been penned by H.P.B. sometime in the Fall of 1885. It was in August of that year that she moved to Würzburg.}}

{{HPB-CW-comment|All references appearing in footnotes within square brackets are added by the Compiler, as a help to students. H.P.B. frequently quotes from one of the best known works of the Marquis Eudes de Mirville, entitled Pneumatologie—Des Esprits et de leurs Manifestations Diverses. This work is divided into separate volumes and the test is divided into “tomes” which do not correspond to the numbered volumes. This should be borne in mind to avoid confusion. Vide Bio-Bibliographical Index for complete data regarding this work.––Compiler.]}}

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<center>{{HPB-CW-comment|[The Theosophist, Vol. VII, No. 76, January, 1886, pp. 243-249]}}</center>

{{Style P-Signature|—Comte Joseph De Maistre, Soirées de Saint

Petersbourg, Vol. II, p. 35.}}}}

But, if meat-eating has indeed become a vital necessity —“the tyrant’s plea”!—among Western nations; if hosts of victims in every city, borough and village of the civilized world must needs be daily slaughtered in temples dedicated to the deity, denounced by St. Paul and worshipped by men “whose God is their belly”:—if all this and much more cannot be avoided in our “age of Iron,” who can urge the same excuse for sport? Fishing, shooting, and hunting, the most fascinating of all the “amusements” of civilized life—are certainly the most objectionable from the standpoint of occult philosophy, the most sinful in the eyes of the followers of these religious systems which are the direct outcome of the Esoteric Doctrine—Hinduism and Buddhism. Is it altogether without any good reason that the adherents of these two religions, now the oldest in the world, regard the animal world—from the huge quadruped down to the infinitesimally small insect—as their “younger brothers,” however ludicrous the idea to a European? This question shall receive due consideration further on.

Nevertheless, exaggerated as the notion may seem, it is certain that few of us are able to picture to ourselves without shuddering the scenes which take place early every morning in the innumerable shambles of the {{Page aside|14}}so-called civilized world, or even those daily enacted during the “shooting season.” The first sun-beam has not yet awakened slumbering nature, when from all points of the compass myriads of hecatombs are being prepared to salute the rising luminary. Never was heathen Moloch gladdened by such a cry of agony from his victims as the pitiful wail that in all Christian countries rings like a long hymn of suffering throughout nature, all day and every day from morning until evening. In ancient Sparta—than whose stern citizens none were ever less sensitive to the delicate feelings of the human heart—a boy, when convicted of torturing an animal for amusement, was put to death as one whose nature was so thoroughly villainous that he could not be permitted to live. But in civilized Europe—rapidly progressing in all things save Christian virtues—might remains unto this day the synonym of right. The entirely useless, cruel practice of shooting for mere sport countless hosts of birds and animals is nowhere carried on with more fervour than in Protestant England, where the merciful teachings of Christ have hardly made human hearts softer than they were in the days of Nimrod, “ the mighty hunter before the Lord.” Christian ethics are as conveniently turned into paradoxical syllogisms as those of the “heathen.” The writer was told one day by a sportsman that since “not a sparrow falls on the ground without the will of the Father,” he who kills for sport—say, one hundred sparrows—does thereby one hundred times over—his Father’s will!

A wretched lot is that of poor brute creatures, hardened as it is into implacable fatality by the hand of man. The rational soul of the human being seems born to become the murderer of the irrational soul of the animal—in the full sense of the word, since the Christian doctrine teaches that the soul of the animal dies with its body. Might not the legend of Cain and Abel have had a dual signification? Look at that other disgrace of our cultured age—the scientific slaughter-houses called “vivisection rooms.” Enter one of those halls in Paris, and behold Paul Bert, or some other of these men—so justly called “the learned {{Page aside|15}}butchers of the Institute”—at his ghastly work. I have but to translate the forcible description of an eye-witness, one who has thoroughly studied the modus operandi of those “executioners,” a well-known French author:

{{Style P-Quote|[Vivisection] is a specialty of the scientific slaughter-houses in which torture, scientifically economised by our butcher-academicians, is applied during whole days, weeks, and even months to the fibres and muscles of one and the same victim. It [torture] makes use of every and any kind of weapon, performs its analysis before a pitiless audience, divides the task every morning between ten apprentices at once, of whom one works on the eye, another one on the leg, the third on the brain, a fourth on the marrow; and whose inexperienced hands succeed, nevertheless, towards night after a hard day’s work, in laying bare the whole of the living carcass they had been ordered to chisel out, and that in the evening is carefully stored away in the cellar, in order that early next morning it may be worked upon again if only there is a breath of life and sensibility left in the victim! We know that the trustees of the Grammont law (loi) have tried to rebel against this abomination; but Paris showed herself more inexorable than London and Glasgow.<ref>Eudes de Mirville, Des Esprits, etc., Vol. VI, Appendix G, pp. 160-61.</ref>}}

And yet these gentlemen boast of the grand object pursued, and of the grand secrets discovered by them. “Horror and lies!”––exclaims the same author.

{{Style P-Quote|In the matter of secrets—a few localisations of faculties and cerebral motions excepted—we know but of one secret that belongs to them by rights: it is the secret of torture eternalised, besides which the terrible natural law of autophagy (mutual manducation), the horrors of war, the merry massacres of sport, and the sufferings of the animal under the butcher’s knife—are as nothing! Glory to our men of science! They have surpassed every former kind of torture, and remain now and for ever, without any possible contestation, the kings of artificial anguish and despair!<ref>bid, p. 161.</ref>}}

{{Style P-Quote|. . . . . . Biblical tolerances, forced from God after the deluge, as so many others, and based upon the decadence of our strength.<ref>Loc. cit.</ref>}}

However this may be, such texts are amply contradicted by others in the same Bible. The meat-eater, the sportsman and even the vivisector—if there are among the last named those who believe in special creation and the Bible––generally quote for their justification that verse in Genesis in which God gives dual Adam—“dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (i, 28); hence—as the Christian understands it—power of life and death over every animal on the globe. To this the far more philosophical Brahman and Buddhist might answer: “Not so. Evolution starts to mould future humanities within the lower scales of being. Therefore by killing an animal, or even an insect, we arrest the progress of an entity towards its final goal in nature—MAN”; and to this the student of occult philosophy may say “Amen,” and add that it not only retards the evolution of that entity, but arrests that of the next succeeding human and more perfect race to come.

Which of the opponents is right, which of them the more logical? The answer depends mainly, of course, on the personal belief of the intermediary chosen to decide the questions. If he believes in special creation—so-called—then in answer to the plain question—“Why should homicide be viewed as a most ghastly sin against God and nature, and the murder of millions of living creatures be regarded as mere sport?”—he will reply:— “Because man is created in God’s own image and looks upward to his Creator and to his birth-place—heaven (os homini sublime dedit),<ref>{{HPB-CW-comment|[Ovid, Metamorphoses, lib. I, Fab. ii, 85-86:<br>

“He gave to man a lofty countenance, and bade him look to the heavens, and turn his gaze upward to the stars.”––Compiler.]}}</ref> and that the gaze of the animal {{Page aside|17}}is fixed downward on its birth-place—the earth; for God said—‘Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind’ (Genesis, i, 24).” Again, “because man is endowed with an immortal soul, and the dumb brute has no immortality, not even a short survival after death.”

Now to this an unsophisticated reasoner might reply that if the Bible is to be our authority upon this delicate question, there is not the slightest proof in it that man’s birth-place is in heaven any more than that of the last of creeping things—quite the contrary; for we find in Genesis that if God created “man” and blessed “them” (i, 27-28) so he created “great whales” and “blessed them” (i, 21-22). Moreover, “the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground” (ii, 7); and “dust” is surely earth pulverized? Solomon, the king and preacher, is most decidedly an authority and admitted on all hands to have been the wisest of the Biblical sages; and he gives utterances to a series of truths in Ecclesiastes (ch. iii) which ought to have settled by this time every dispute upon the subject. “The sons of men . . . . might see that they themselves are beasts” (iii, 18) . . . . “that which befalleth the sons of men, befalleth the beasts . . . . . a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast” (iii, 19) . . . “all go into one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again” (iii, 20) . . . . “who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upwards, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downwards to the earth?” (iii, 21). Indeed, “who knoweth!” At any rate it is neither science nor “school divine.”

Were the object of these lines to preach vegetarianism on the authority of Bible or Veda, it would be a very easy task to do so. For, if it is quite true that God gave dual Adam—the “male and female” of Chapter I of Genesis—who has little to do with our henpecked ancestor of Chapter II—“dominion over every living thing,” yet we nowhere find that the “Lord God” commanded that Adam or the other to devour animal creation or destroy it for sport. Quite the reverse. For pointing to the {{Page aside|18}}vegetable kingdom and the “fruit of a tree yielding seed”—God says very plainly: “to you [men] it shall be for meat” (i. 29).

So keen was the perception of this truth among the early Christians that during the first centuries they never touched meat. In Octavius Tertullian writes to Minucius Felix:

{{Style P-Quote|. . . . . . . we are not permitted either to witness, or even hear narrated (novere) a homicide, we Christians, who refuse to taste dishes in which animal blood may have been mixed.}}<ref>{{HPB-CW-comment|[There seems to be some confusion here in connection with Tertullian. Octavius is a work written by Minucius Felix, who lived between the middle of the 2nd and the middle of the 3rd century A.D., and is concerned with a defence of Christianity. Tertullian does not figure in it at all. It is true, however, that scholars have detected a number of similarities between Octavius and Tertullian’s Apologeticus, where similar subjects are treated. The passage quoted by H.P.B. constitutes the last sentence of Chapter xxx of Octavius. This chapter is concerned mainly with a defence of the Christians against the accusation that their rites of initiation involved the slaughter of an infant and the eating of bread dipped in its blood. A similar passage can be found in Chapter IX of the Apologeticus. The Latin text of the passage from Octavius is as follows:<br>

This is translated by R. E. Wallis (Ante Nicene Fathers, Vol. IV) thus:<br>

––Compiler.]}}</ref>

But the writer does not preach vegetarianism, simply defending “animal rights” and attempting to show the fallacy of disregarding such rights on Biblical authority. Moreover, to argue with those who would reason upon the lines of erroneous interpretations would be quite useless. One who rejects the doctrine of evolution will ever find his way paved with difficulties; hence, he will never admit that it is far more consistent with fact and logic to {{Page aside|19}}regard physical man merely as the recognized paragon of animals, and the spiritual Ego that informs him as a principle midway between the soul of the animal and the deity. It would be vain to tell him that unless he accepts not only the verses quoted for his justification but the whole mass of contradictions and seeming absurdities in it—he will never obtain the key to the truth; for he will not believe it. Yet the whole Bible teems with charity to men and with mercy and love to animals. The original Hebrew text of Chapter xxiv of Leviticus is full of it. Instead of the verse 18 as translated in the Bible: “And he that killeth a beast shall make it good; beast for beast,” in the original it stands: “Life for life,” or rather “soul for soul,” nephesh tachat nephesh.<ref>Compare also the difference between the translation of the same verses in the Vulgata, and the texts of Luther and De Wette.</ref> And if the rigour of the law did not go to the extent of killing, as in Sparta, a man’s “soul” for a beast’s “soul”––still, even though he replaced the slaughtered soul by a living one, a heavy additional punishment was inflicted on the culprit.

But this was not all. In Exodus (xx, 10, and xxiii, 11-12) rest on the Sabbath day extended to cattle and every other animal. “The seventh day is the sabbath . . . . thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy . . . . cattle”; and the Sabbath year, “the seventh year thou shalt let it [the land] rest and lie still . . . . that thine ox and thine ass may rest”—which commandment, if it means anything, shows that even the brute creation was not excluded by the ancient Hebrews from a participation in the worship of their deity, and that it was placed upon many occasions on a par with man himself. The whole question rests upon the misconception that “soul,” nephesh, is entirely distinct from “spirit”—ruach. And yet it is clearly stated that “God breathed into the nostrils (of man) the breath of life and man became a living soul,” nephesh, neither more or less than an animal, for the soul of an animal is also called nephesh. It is by development that the soul becomes spirit, both being the lower and the {{Page aside|20}}higher rungs of one and the same ladder whose basis is the UNIVERSAL SOUL or spirit.

This statement will startle those good men and women who, however much they may love their cats and dogs, are yet too much devoted to the teachings of their respective churches ever to admit such a heresy. “The irrational soul of a dog or a frog divine and immortal as our own souls are?”—they are sure to exclaim: but so they are. It is not the humble writer of the present article who says so, but no less an authority for every good Christian than that king of the preachers—St. Paul. Our opponents who so indignantly refuse to listen to the arguments of either modern or esoteric science may perhaps lend a more willing ear to what their own saint and apostle has to say on the matter; the true interpretation of whose words, moreover, shall be given neither by a theosophist nor an opponent, but by one who was as good and pious a Christian as any, namely, another saint—John Chrysostom—he who explained and commented upon the Pauline Epistles, and who is held in the highest reverence by the divines of both the Roman Catholic and the Protestant churches. Christians have already found that experimental science is not on their side; they may be still more disagreeably surprised upon finding that no Hindu could plead more earnestly for animal life than did St. Paul in writing to the Romans. Hindus indeed claim mercy to the dumb brute only on account of the doctrine of transmigration and hence of the sameness of the principle or element that animates both man and brute. St. Paul goes further: he shows [Rom., viii, 21] the animal hoping for, and living in the expectation of the same deliverance “from the bondage of corruption” as any good Christian. The precise. expressions of that great apostle and philosopher will be quoted later on in the present Essay and their true meaning shown.