Ancient Theosophy; or Spiritism in the Past
From the sacred books of a tribe of Bedouin Arabs who worshipped Alvah or Allah, the Beni-Israel or Hebrews, we have brought down to us much matter of the deepest interest. The accidental sale of a shepherd boy has given us, independent of Greek or Egyptian sources, a far better knowledge of ancient Theosophy and its branches than in any other records.
The two distinct classes of wise men and sorcerers of Egypt, and their enchantments, appear in the pages of these remarkable books. The divination of the dreams of one of her kings, the probable initiation of Abraham and the certain reception of Moses into the mysteries of Isis, lend a wonderful charm to the deemed miraculous character of the early history of the Jews, which, by the aid of Theurgical experience, can now be easily explained that the patriarchs and prophets were often under influence of elementary and higher spirits, and in this condition had visions and prophecied. These referred to natural causes, it serves to dissipate the halo cast around a race who were less gifted, and no more peculiar, than those of other nations around them.
In the Pentateuch,—whether written by Moses or not is immaterial,—we find numerous commands given respecting magic and sorcery. Learned as Moses was “in all the wisdom of the Egyptians,” which we can discern by his having known the old allegorical Chaldean and Hindoo myth traceable to serpent worship of Adina and Heva, (which simply signified that so long as humanity held in harmony with nature or simple principles all went well), he was doubtless aware of the prejudicial effects of the misuse of Spiritism; and we therefore are able to know from the Pentateuch, as well as the Talmud and Zohar, that it was divided into three classes— Astrology, and Black and White Magic.
We thus learn that evil enchantments, magical cures, the citation of evil spirits, and the invoking of the dead was supposed to be common among the Jews. Further, that those I who invoked the dead should be condemned to death, and the questioner to scourging. It was simply forbidden by Moses to practice magic, not to have knowledge thereof or study it; for the Sanhedrim, necessarily composed of adepts, with wisdom gained in the secret schools of the nabim, were acquainted with theosophical principles, otherwise they would have been unable to give judgment for offences.
In defiance of these enactments, magic seem to have been pretty rife; for the medium of Endor raised up the spirit of Samuel for Saul. Balaam, too, had powerful mediumistic powers, and King Manasseh, as we are told in the second Book of Kings, “observed times, and used enchantments, and dealt with familiar spirits and wizards." As a further proof of the high state of development, the practicers of the science was divided into eight classes—the user of divination, the observer of dreams, the serpent charmer, the sorcerer, the charmer, consulter of familiar spirits, the wizard, magician, or wise one, and the necromancer or consulter of departed spirits.
It has been asserted that the Jews had no conception of a future life, but that all ended in Sheal—the grave. Judging from what I have narrated, such cannot have been the case; particularly when we remark their knowledge of good and evil spirits, and of an unseen universe.
Josephus tells us that Solomon was enabled “to learn that skill which expels demons, a science which is useful and sanative lo sun. He composed such incantations, also, by which distempers are alleviated; and he left behind him the manner of using such exorcisms, by which they drive away demons so that they never return.”
How different is the Masonry of today, which claims to leach the hidden secrets of nature and science, compared with what the builder of the Temple and his initiates knew. Alas! the occult mysteries have degenerated into a jingle of empty words and mere ceremonial, with Brotherly Love, Relief and Truth remaining a glittering shell; but the kernel, the spiritistic culture of the Magus, the Grand Master Solomon is gone with the twenty-four elders with faces toward the east. The materiality is there, but the glory, the spiritality seems departed forever.
Through the captivity of the Jews in Babylon, “by the waters of which they sat down and wept,” spiritism assumed the phase we can trace up to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in the Hebrew cabalists.
In the Book of Job is plainly discernable Chaldean influence, and all will remember when Nebuchadnezzar “commanded to be called to him the magicians, and the astrologers, and the sorcerers, and the Chaldeans” of his kingdom; and his son Belshazzar doing the same. Josephus narrates the account of Eleazar before the Emperor Vespasian and his army casting forth evil spirits by the application of a ring, “like that spoken of by Solomon,” and metallic basin of water, which cannot but forcibly call to mind of those who have studied this subject, of the similar methods exhibited in Egyptian monuments, and described ty the Greek and Roman authorities, and also used to this day in India,
The learned Professor de Lara, in one of his essays, says “that Christianity is a word that no one understands;” and I think all must agree with him that it is a most convertible one, for the term Christian being now-a-days applied to members of all creeds,—to the Jew, Infidel, Turk, and even the Atheist. That the aggregate of Christians for the last eighteen centuries have been believers in Spiritism is unquestionable; and none can doubt but a considerable portion of the erratic peculiarities has been derived from the theological ideas engrafted on the simple system taught by the architect’s son.
It is unnecessary to our present inqniry whether, as some have supposed, that Christ is a mythical personage, or identified with the Hindoo virgin’s son Chrishna, called Jereus, signifying in the Sanskrit, “the Divine Essence;” also, whether Josephus did write the debated passage, and that history is silent on the Massacre of the Innocents, and the other stale arguments repeated ad nauseam.
All this, in the presence of the ethics we have for our study in the body of truth in the New Testament, mixed up with the apocryphal matter, Seeley, in his “Ecce Homo,” admirably winnows away, and it is undesirable to enter it. For I have no doubt you will agree, despite of orientalism, that Christ was an actual living personage, and was crucified; leaving humanity, whether allegorically or not, one of the sublimest examples of abnegation for truth’s sake which the world has ever yet been taught. It is recognized by most thinkers, that the doctrines attributed to Christ are those of the Essenes, based on the Platonism which entered Judea by Greek influence with the Romans. Like the therapeuta, or later Hermetists, the great principle of his teaching was the subservience of self to the philosophy and science of Esoteric Theosophy.
According to the principles of that system, the apparently miraculous effect attributed to Christ are simply caused by natural laws, unknown to the generality of mankind, but conserved by the Illuminati through ancient days to the present in the mysteries.
Many of these so called miracles narrated by the Evange list, you will doubtless agree did occur, and from his profes sion, Lute, an intelligent physician, would necessarily have been additionally impressed with such as healing the leprous and palsied, and raising the dead by bringing back the spirit before decay had set in,—all of which Theurgists claim are not impossible to adepts.
That the first four books of the New Testament are full of Spiritism, it is needless to add, or bring before you such cases as the casting out of elementary spirits, or Christ's theory of Spirit and the Supreme, which carries out the idea of Tiedemann.
“For if we are candid we must admit that the teachings concerning spirits—demons—and Satan, by Christ, the apostle of the New Testament, even of the whole of the early Chris tians, was no other than the then universally accepted belief of the East, as it had been received in Judea, but modified according to the new belief of the world, and by the magical knowledge of the age.”
Everything connected with Christ being doubtless only too well engraved on your hearts, I shall simply content myself with quoting a few lines on him from Ernest Renan.
“Shall originality be born anew, or shall the world henceforth be content to follow the paths opened by the bold orators of the ancient ages? We know not. But whatever may be the surprises of the future, Jesus will never be surpassed. His worship will grow without ceasing; his legend will call forth tears without end; his sufferings will melt the noblest hearts; all ages will proclaim that among the sons of men there is none born greater than Jesus.”
After Christ’s death, his followers continued in his belief concerning Spiritism; and in the Acts of the Apostles we trace out two nosed occultists, Clymas and Simon Magus, of whom two fathers of the church, Clemens Romanus and Anastatius Sinaita, narrate particulars not generally known.
Other fathers of the church believed in spirital emanation, and that those possessed by elementaries lived in deserts. They also acknowledged their potency; for that exemplary Christian, Constantine, ordered all who invoked spirits to be burnt alive, as an introduction to the more delightful and lasting heat prepared for them in the sulphur and brimstone arrangements.
The absurd stories which the Christian Fathers give us of matters connected with the Unseen Universe, are nearer the ridiculous than the sublime. Tertulliaa says that the 'world is lull of evil spirits, and gives a somewhat risible account of the daughters of men, who married angels, having been taught by them “to dye wool, and to commit the still more fearful offence of painting their faces—for which they had been justly condemned to eternal suffering.”
St. Augustine, in a lengthy and most learned essay, suggests that the angels who had taught them the dreadful crime of using rouge and white lead were possibly Incubi. St. Gregory the Great, in his dialogue, tells us most seriously of a nun in the sixth century, who, having hurriedly eaten some fruit in a garden without making the sign of the cross, had the felicity of swallowing a devil in a lettuce for her pains.
Ancient Theosophy; or Spiritism in the Past
The great difficulty with investigators is in the discrimination of false and true, for superstitious credulity is ready to attribute everything to the impossible and supernatural. Many dreams take place under spirit influence; as, for instance, in the case of Simonides, who, when sleeping, was warned and his life saved by seeing the corpse of a dead per son under peculiar circumstances; and there are hundreds of other cases, of genuine trance visions.
In the face of many media having been caught imposing on the public, the sophistic juggleries of charlatans, and the artfully concocted tales of impecunious adventurers, those who accept Spiritualism to the fullest, which I do not, being simply a Spiritist, or believer in Spirit, it is desirable something should be done, to decide the difference between physical phenomena and those from spirital influence. Simple planchette manifestations, or the taking of plaster casts, may be probably caused by psychometric power, or the secret knowledge of unknown natural principles; at present, if a table has the notion to dance a Highland fling, or an arm-chair an Irish jig, the cry is immediately made, “The Spirital” Study Brewster's “Natural Magic,” and you will find that, by the aid of concave mirrors, “chemical appliances,” pyrotechnic “saturated vapors filtered through funnels, and other apparatus, it is easy to produce forms like that of Pepper’s Ghost, or “dreadful shapes of beings” It is, therefore, absolutely necessary to use the utmost care in testing the conditions, and thoroughly analyzing the pretensions of an experimentizer.
That genuine phenomenal manifestations and materializations have occurred and do occur in our days, none can doubt, after reading the honest and straightforward account of the numberless well-attested cases by persons of responsibility, who have no interested motives to serve.
In the present hostile attitude of Materialist and Spiritualist, misunderstandings appear to multiply. If an eclectic course were taken by both, and an harmonious integraiization arranged by the aid of some broad, co-operative platform, the present bitterness would close, and we should not have theories of re-incarnation and other absurdities vamped up from the writings of ancient authors who only enunciated such ideas speculatively, rather than dogmatically. Will-o’-the wisp ideas, perhaps correct though not proven, fasten like the excrescences grafted on the simple teachings of Christ.
Those who object to Esotericism, or the conservation of the knowledge of occult or hidden forces acting upon the visible and invisible universes, have apparently good grounds of demur. But I do not despair at the objection; for all must agree if the powers attributed to the Theurgists were placed in the hands of the incompetent or criminal, the earth would soon be devastated, and the same picture would be exhibited as that seen in the French Revolution. Here men, acting on stem and grand principles, founded on primitive truths about to have been more or less revealed to those competent, allowed their belief, in an idea like the “Vox Dei, vox Populi,” of Robespierre, to carry riot and bloodshed in its train. Suppose this knowledge were freely handed over to the inhabitants of the Five Points, of Seven Dials in London, of the Quartier du Temple of Paris, or to the unkempt, unclothed multitudes who teem in the lower quarters of European cities, where I have seen law-defying crime stalking unmolested in broad daylight, and imagine the fearful results. Esotericism is necessary, and proves by example the Darwinian law of the Survival of the Fittest.
When I listen to scoffers charging advanced Spiritistic students with endeavoring to retrograde society into the dark ages, I wonder whether such Utopian ideas ever entered their heads. I am confident no such task will be attempted. It would be equally absurd as that of a Swiss peasant stopping an avalanche with a handspike, or of the famed Mrs. Partington bailing out the ocean with a sieve.
It is stated the Esoteric philosophers kept the vulgar utterly ignorant, and in a debased condition. In the face of the discoveries constantly turning up of the remains of olden peoples, of the Greek and Roman law codes, the astronomical erudition, the high cultivation in every department, and, above all, the libraries like that of Alexandria, which displayed the energetic and public spirit of the ancients, we can discern how untruthful is the statement which comes from the mouths of a handful of irreconcilable Comtists, who are unable to show a solitary lyceum, school, or hall on the whole face of the globe. These men talk largely of our getting out of the metaphysical age into the scientific age, as if there had never been a scientific age, as in Egyptian or Hindoo early periods. Verily, it is a scientific age, and only inculcates, apparently, the science by which Whiskey Tammany Rings manipulate the hard-earned money of the people into their own pockets. Yes, it is a scientific age, and words of mine are unable to express the truth so admirably as that of a well-known public man at the recent opening of the Cincinnati Industrial Exhibition, who says:—
“We have at last reached a stage in the experiment of the modern republic when it is necessary to ‘provide things honest in the sight of all men,’ or this great nation about to celebrate its majority in the civic solemnities of the Centennial year—a nation which has Daunted its flag for a hundred years upon every shore and sea where discovery and enterprise have held out their lures; a nation which thus far has had an almost unprecedented history in the triumphs which embellish the annals of life and progress—this American people is now at a juncture which demands the demonstration of virtue in personal character and honesty in business dealing, or it will sink by the dead weight of its own corruption. And there is corruption almost everywhere. People seem to forget that there are such things as principle and honor and confidence. The veil is, month after month, being lifted from before what we supposed were the shrines of integrity to <... continues on page 3-133 >
Editor's notes
Sources
Spiritual Scientist, v. 4, No. 11, May 18, 1876, pp. 124-5
Spiritual Scientist, v. 4, No. 13, June 1, 1876, pp. 148-9