Chapter VI

That day the journey began early, and was very protracted. Twice during it they halted at little inns to rest the horses and to obtain what food they could. By the evening they had entered upon the most deserted region of the great forest which was one of the prides of the country. The King’s hunting seat, where he now was, stood in a part of this forest, but in quite another region, a long distance from this wild place where Hilary and his companions now were. Hilary had never been within the forest, as few from the city ever penetrated it except as part of the King’s retinue, and then they only saw such tracts of it as were preserved and in order. Of this wilder region practically little was known, and the spirit of adventure within Hilary made him rejoice to find that their journey led them through this unpopulated district. His curiosity as to their destination was not now very acute, for the experiences of the passing moments were all sufficient. It is true that he was conscious of the great gulf fixed between himself and Fleta. He knew her to be his superior in every respect. He knew not only that he must always be separated from her by their difference in station but that he was more vitally separated from her by their difference in 199thought—and that even now. But he was made happy by a look of love that plunged deep from her eyes into his own now and again, and he was thrilled to the heart when her hand touched his with a light and delicate pressure that he alone could understand. Ah! that secret understanding which separates lovers from all the rest of the world. How sweet it is! How strange it is, too, for they are overpowered by a mutual sense of sympathy which appears to be a supreme intelligence, giving each the power to look into the other’s heart. Dear moments are they when this is realised, when all life outside the sacred circle in which the two dwell is obscure and dim, while that within is rich, and strong, and sweet. Hilary lived supremely content only in the consciousness of being near this woman whom he loved; for now that he had actually asked her love, and been granted it, nothing else existed for him save that sweet fact. He was indifferent to the hardships, and, indeed, probable dangers, of the journey they were upon, which might have made a more intrepid spirit uneasy; for now he was content to suffer, or even to die, if all conditions were shared with Fleta. All her life could not be shared with him, but all his could be shared with her. When a man reaches this point, and is content to face such a state of things between himself and the woman he loves, he may be reckoned as being in love indeed.

Quite late at night it was when this day’s journey ended, and the splendid horses were really tired out. But a certain point evidently had to be reached, and the postilions pushed on. Fleta at last seemed to grow a little anxious, and several times rose in the carriage to look on ahead; once or twice she inquired of the postilions if they were certain of their way. They answered yes; though how that could be was to Hilary a mystery, for they had been for a long while travelling over mere grass tracts, of which there were many, to his eyes undistinguishable one from the other. But the postilions either had landmarks which he could not detect, or else knew their way very well. At last they stopped; and in the dim light Hilary saw that there was a gate at the side of the track, a gate wide enough to drive through, but of the very simplest construction. It might have defended merely a spot where young trees were planted, or some kind of preserving done; and it was set in a fence of the same character, almost entirely hidden by thick growth of wild shrubs. The Princess Fleta produced from her dress a whistle on which she sounded a clear ringing note, and then everybody sat still and waited. It seemed to Hilary that it was quite a long while that they waited; perhaps it was not really long, but the night was so still, the silence so profound, the feeling of expectancy so strong. He was, for the first time since they started, really very curious as to what would happen next. What did happen at last was this. There was a sound of laughter and footsteps, and presently two figures appeared at the gate; one that of a tall man, the other that of a young, slight girl. The gate was unlocked and thrown 200wide open, and a moment later the young girl was in the carriage, embracing Fleta with the greatest enthusiasm and delight. Hilary hardly knew how everything happened, but presently the whole party was standing together inside the gate, the carriage had driven in and was out of sight. Then the tall man shut and locked the gate, after which he turned back, and walked on ahead with the young girl at his side, while Hilary followed with Fleta. The moon had risen now, and Hilary could see her beautiful face plainly, wearing on it an unusually gay and happy expression; her lips seemed to smile at her own thoughts. The sweet gladness in her face made Hilary’s heart spring with joy. It could not be rejoining her friends that made her so glad, for they had gone on and left her alone with him.

“Fleta—my princess—no, my Fleta,” he said, “are you happy to be with me? I think you are!”

“Yes, I am happy to be with you—but I am not Fleta.”

“Not Fleta!” echoed Hilary, in utter incredulity.

He stopped, and catching his companion’s hand, looked into her face. She glanced up, and her eyes were full of shy coquetry and ready gaiety.

“I might be her twin sister, might I not, if I am not Fleta herself? Ah! no, Fleta’s fate is to live in a court—mine to live in a forest Live!—no, it is not life!”

What was it in that voice that made his heart grow hot with passion? Fiercely he exclaimed to himself that it was, it must, be Fleta’s voice. No other woman could speak in such tones—no other woman’s words give him such a sense of maddening joy.

“Oh! yes,” he said, “it is life—when one loves, one lives anywhere.”

“Yes, perhaps, when one loves!” was the answer.

“You told me this morning that you loved me, Fleta!” cried Hilary in despair.

“Ah! but I am not Fleta,” was the mocking answer. It sounded like mockery indeed as she spoke. And yet the voice was Fleta’s. There was no doubt of that. He looked, he listened, he watched. The voice, the face, the glorious eyes, were Fleta’s. It was Fleta who was beside him, say she what she might.

They had been following the others all this while, and had now reached a clearing in the wood, where was a garden full of sweet flowers, as Hilary could tell at once by the rich scents that came to him on the night air.

“I am glad we have reached the house,” said his companion, “for I am very tired and hungry. Are not you? I wonder what we shall have for supper. You know this is an enchanted place which we call the palace of surprises. We never know what will happen next. That is why one can enjoy a holiday here as one can enjoy it no where else. At home there is a frightful monotony about the eating and drinking 201Everything is perfect, of course, but it is always the same. Now here one is fed like a Russian one day, and a Hungarian the next. There is a perpetual novelty about the menus, and yet they are always good. Is not that extraordinary. And oh! the wines, great heavens! what a cellar our sainted father keeps. I can only bless, with all my heart, the long dead founders of his order, who instituted such a system.”

Hilary had regarded his companion with increasing amazement during this speech. Certainly it was unlike Fleta. Was she acting for his benefit? But at the words “sainted father” another idea thrust that one out of his head. What had become of Father Amyot? He had not seen him leave the carriage, or approach the house.

“Oh, your holy companion has gone to his brethren,” said the girl, with a laugh. “They have a place of their own where they torture themselves and mortify the flesh. But they entertain us well, and that is what I care for. We will have a dance to-night. Oh! Hilary, the music here! It is better than that of any band in the world!”

“If you are not, Fleta, how do you know my name?”

“Simple creature! What a question! Why, Fleta has told me all about you. Did you never hear that the princess had a foster-sister, and that none could ever tell which was which, so like were we—and are we! Did you never hear that Fleta’s mother was blonde, and dull, and plain, and that Fleta is like none of her own family? Oh, Hilary, you, fresh from the city, you know nothing!”

A sudden remembrance crossed Hilary’s mind.

“I have heard,” he said, “that no one could tell where Fleta had drawn her beauty from. But I believe you draw it from youryour own beautiful soul!”

“Ah, you still think me Fleta? I have had some happy hours in the city before now when Fleta has let me play at being a princess. Ah, but the men all thought the princess in a strange, charming, delightful humour on these days. And when next they saw her, that humour was gone, and they were afraid to speak to her. Come in. I am starving!”

They had entered a wide, low doorway, and stood now within the great hall. What a strange hall it was! The floor was covered with the skins of animals, many of them very handsome skins; and great jars held flowering plants, the scent from which made the air rich and heavy. A wood fire burned on the wide hearth, and before it, still in the dress she had travelled in, stood—Fleta.

Yes, Fleta.

The girl who stood at Hilary’s side laughed and clapped her hands as he uttered a cry of amazement, even of horror.

“This is some of your magic, Fleta!” he exclaimed involuntarily.

The Princess turned at his words. She was looking singularly grave and stern; her glance gave Hilary a sense of almost fear.

“No,” she answered in a low, quiet voice that had a tone, as Hilary 202fancied, of pain, “it is not magic. It is all very natural. This is Adine, my little sister; so like me that I do not know her from myself.”

She drew Adine to her with a gesture which had a protecting tenderness in it. This was the Princess who spoke, queen-like in her kindness. Hilary stood, unable to speak, unable to think, unable to understand. Before him stood two girls—each Fleta. Only by the difference of expression could he detect any difference between them. One threw him back the most coquettish and charming glance, as she went towards her grave sister. He could feel keenly how vitally different the two were. Yet they stood side by side, and though Fleta said “my little sister” there was no outward difference between them. Adine was as tall, as beautiful—and the same in everything!

“Do not be startled,” said Fleta quietly, “you will soon grow used to the likeness.”

“Though I doubt,” added Adine, with a wicked glance from her brilliant eyes, “whether you will ever tell us apart except when we are not together.”

“Come,” said Fleta, “let us go and wash the travel stains off. It is just supper time.”

Fleta talked of travel stains, but as Hilary looked at her queenly beauty, he thought she seemed as fresh as though she had but from this moment come from the hands of her maid. However, the two went away arm in arm, Adine turning at the door to have one last glance of amusement at Hilary’s utterly perplexed face. He was left alone, and he remained standing where he was, without power of thought or motion.

Presently some one came and touched him on the shoulder; this was necessary in order to attract his attention. It was the tall man who had come to the gate to meet them. He was very handsome, and with the most cheerful and good-natured expression; his blue eyes were full of laughter.

“Come,” he said, “come and see your room. I am master of the ceremonies here; apply to me for anything you want—even information! I may, or may not give it, according to the decision of the powers that be. Call me Mark. I have a much longer name, in fact, half-a-dozen much longer ones, and a few titles to boot; but they would not interest you, and in the midst of a forest where nobody has any dignity, a name of one syllable is by far the best.” While he talked on like this, apparently indifferent as to whether Hilary listened or no, he led the way out of the hall and down a wide, carpeted corridor. He opened the last door in this, and ushered Hilary in.

(To be continued.)

203

THE SCIENCE OF LIFE.

What is Life? Hundreds of the most philosophical minds, scores of learned well-skilled physicians, have asked themselves the question, but to little purpose. The veil thrown over primordial Kosmos and the mysterious beginnings of life upon it, has never been withdrawn to the satisfaction of earnest, honest science. The more the men of official learning try to penetrate through its dark folds, the more intense becomes that darkness, and the less they see, for they are like the treasure-hunter, who went across the wide seas to look for that which lay buried in his own garden.

What is then this Science? Is it biology, or the study of life in its general aspect? No. Is it physiology, or the science of organic function? Neither; for the former leaves the problem as much the riddle of the Sphinx as ever; and the latter is the science of death far more than that of life. Physiology is based upon the study of the different organic functions and the organs necessary to the manifestations of life, but that which science calls living matter, is, in sober truth, dead matter. Every molecule of the living organs contains the germ of death in itself, and begins dying as soon as born, in order that its successor-molecule should live only to die in its turn. An organ, a natural part of every living being, is but the medium for some special function in life, and is a combination of such molecules. The vital organ, the whole, puts the mask of life on, and thus conceals the constant decay and death of its parts. Thus, neither biology nor physiology are the science, nor even branches of the Science of Life, but only that of the appearances of life. While true philosophy stands Œdipus-like before the Sphinx of life, hardly daring to utter the paradox contained in the answer to the riddle propounded, materialistic science, as arrogant as ever, never doubting its own wisdom for one moment, biologises itself and many others into the belief that it has solved the awful problem of existence. In truth, however, has it even so much as approached its threshold? It is not, surely, by attempting to deceive itself and the unwary in saying that life is but the result of molecular complexity, that it can ever hope to promote the truth. Is vital force, indeed, only a “phantom,” as Du-Bois Reymond calls it? For his taunt that “life,” as something independent, is but the asylum ignorantiæ of those who seek refuge in abstractions, when direct explanation is impossible, applies with far more force and justice to those materialists who would blind people to the reality of facts, by substituting bombast and jaw-breaking words in their place. Have any of the five divisions of the functions of life, so pretentiously 204named—Archebiosis, Biocrosis, Biodiæresis, Biocænosis and Bioparodosis^[49], ever helped a Huxley or a Hæckel to probe more fully the mystery of the generations of the humblest ant—let alone of man? Most certainly not. For life, and everything pertaining to it, belongs to the lawful domain of the metaphysician and psychologist, and physical science has no claim upon it. “That which hath been, is that which shall be; and that which hath been is named already—and it is known that it is MAN”—is the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx. But “man” here, does not refer to physical man—not in its esoteric meaning, at any rate. Scalpels and microscopes may solve the mystery of the material parts of the shell of man: they can never cut a window into his soul to open the smallest vista on any of the wider horizons of being.

It is those thinkers alone, who, following the Delphic injunction, have cognized life in their inner selves, those who have studied it thoroughly in themselves, before attempting to trace and analyze its reflection in their outer shells, who are the only ones rewarded with some measure of success. Like the fire-philosophers of the Middle Ages, they have skipped over the appearances of light and fire in the world of effects, and centred their whole attention upon the producing arcane agencies. Thence, tracing these to the one abstract cause, they have attempted to fathom the Mystery, each as far as his intellectual capacities permitted him. Thus they have ascertained that (1) the seemingly living mechanism called physical man, is but the fuel, the material, upon which life feeds, in order to manifest itself; and (2) that thereby the inner man receives as his wage and reward the possibility of accumulating additional experiences of the terrestrial illusions called lives.

One of such philosophers is now undeniably the great Russian novelist and reformer, Count Lef N. Tolstoi. How near his views are to the esoteric and philosophical teachings of higher Theosophy, will be found on the perusal of a few fragments from a lecture delivered by him at Moscow before the local Psychological Society.

Discussing the problem of life, the Count asks his audience to admit, for the sake of argument, an impossibility. Says the lecturer:—

Let us grant for a moment that all that which modern science longs to learn of life, it has learnt, and now knows; that the problem has become as clear as day; that it is clear how organic matter has, by simple adaptation, come to be originated from inorganic material; that it is as clear how natural forces may be transformed into feelings, will, thought, and that finally, all this is known, not only to the city student, but to every village schoolboy, as well.

I am aware, then, that such and such thoughts and feelings originate from such and such motions. Well, and what then? Can I, or cannot I, produce and guide such motions, in order to excite within my brain corresponding thoughts? The question—what are the thoughts and 205feelings I ought to generate in myself and others, remains still, not only unsolved, but even untouched.

Yet it is precisely this question which is the one fundamental question of the central idea of life.

Science has chosen as its object a few manifestations that accompany life; and mistaking^[50] the part for the whole, called these manifestations the integral total of life....”

The question inseparable from the idea of life is not whence life, but how one should live that life: and it is only by first starting with this question that one can hope to approach some solution in the problem of existence.

The answer to the query “How are we to live?” appears so simple to man that he esteems it hardly worth his while to touch upon it.

... One must live the best way one can—that’s all. This seems at first sight very simple and well known to all, but it is by far neither as simple nor as well known as one may imagine....

The idea of life appears to man in the beginning as a most simple and self-evident business. First of all, it seems to him that life is in himself, in his own body. No sooner, however, does one commence his search after that life, in any one given spot of the said body, than one meets with difficulties. Life is not in the hair, nor in the nails; neither is it in the foot nor the arm, which may both be amputated; it is not in the blood, it is not in the heart, and it is not in the brain. It is everywhere and it is nowhere. It comes to this: life cannot be found in any of its dwelling-places. Then man begins to look for life in Time; and that, too, appears at first a very easy matter.... Yet again, no sooner has he started on his chase than he perceives that here also the business is more complicated than he had thought. Now, I have lived fifty-eight years, so says my baptismal church record. But I know that out of these fifty-eight years I slept over twenty. How then? have I lived all these years, or have I not? Deduct the months of my gestation, and those I passed in the arms of my nurse, and shall we call this life, also? Again, out of the remaining thirty-eight years, I know that a good half of that time I slept while moving about; and thus, I could no more say in this case, whether I lived during that time or not. I may have lived a little, and vegetated a little. Here again, one finds that in time, as in the body, life is everywhere, yet nowhere. And now the question naturally arises, whence, then, that life which I can trace to nowhere? Now—will I learn.... But it so happens that in this direction also, what seemed to me so easy at first, now seems impossible. I must have been searching for something 206else, not for my life, assuredly.assuredly. Therefore, once we have to go in search of the whereabouts of life—if search we have to—then it should be neither in space nor in time, neither as cause nor effect, but as a something which I cognize within myself as quite independent from Space, time and causality.

That which remains to do now is to study self. But how do I cognize life in myself?

This is how I cognize it. I know, to begin with, that I live; and that I live wishing for myself everything that is good, wishing this since I can remember myself, to this day, and from morn till night. All that lives outside of myself is important in my eyes, but only in so far as it co-operates with the creation of that which is productive of my welfare. The Universe is important in my sight only because it can give meme, pleasure.

Meanwhile, something else is bound up with this knowledge in me of my existence. Inseparable from the life I feel, is another cognition allied to it; namely, that besides myself, I am surroundedsurrounded with a whole world of living creatures, possessed, as I am myself, of the same instinctive realization of their exclusive lives; that all these creatures live for their own objects, which objects are foreign to me; that those creatures do not know, nor do they care to know, anything of my pretensions to an exclusive life, and that all these creatures, in order to achieve success in their objects, are ready to annihilate me at any moment. But this is not all. While watching the destruction of creatures similar in all to myself, I also know that for me too, for that precious ME in whom alone life is represented, a very speedy and inevitable destruction is lying in wait.

It is as if there were two “I’s” in man; it is as if they could never live in peace together; it is as if they were eternally struggling, and ever trying to expel each other.

One “I” says, “I alone am living as one should live, all the rest only seems to live. Therefore, the whole raison d’être for the universe is in that I may be made comfortable.”comfortable.”

The other “I” replies, “The universe is not for thee at all, but for its own aims and purposes, and it cares little to know whether thou art happy or unhappy.”

Life becomes a dreadful thing after this!

One “I” says, “I only want the gratification of all my wants and desires, and that is why I need the universe.”

The other “I” replies, “All animal life lives only for the gratification of its wants and desires. It is the wants and desires of animals alone that are gratified at the expense and detriment of other animals; hence the ceaseless struggle between the animal species. Thou art an animal, and therefore thou hast to struggle. Yet, however successful in thy struggle, the rest of the struggling creatures must sooner or later crush thee.”

207Still worse! life becomes still more dreadful....

But the most terrible of all, that which includes in itself the whole of the foregoing, is that:—

One “I” says, “I want to live, to live for ever.”

And that the other “I” replies, “Thou shalt surely, perhaps in a few minutes, die; as also shall die all those thou lovest, for thou and they are destroying with every motion your lives, and thus approaching ever nearer suffering, death, all that which thou so hatest, and which thou fearest above anything else.”

This is the worst of all....

To change this condition is impossible.... One can avoid moving, sleeping, eating, even breathing, but one cannot escape from thinking. One thinks, and that thought, my thought, is poisoning every step in my life, as a personality.

No sooner has man commenced a conscious life than that consciousness repeats to him incessantly without respite, over and over the same thing again. “To live such life as you feel and see in your past, the life lived by animals and many men too, lived in that way, which made you become what you are now—is no longer possible. Were you to attempt doing so, you could never escape thereby the struggle with all the world of creatures which live as you do—for their personal objects; and then those creatures will inevitably destroy you.”...

To change this situation is impossible. There remains but one thing to do, and that is always done by him who, beginning to live, transfers his objects in life outside of himself, and aims to reach them.... But, however far he places them outside his personality, as his mind gets clearer, none of these objects will satisfy him.

Bismarck, having united Germany, and now ruling Europe—if his reason has only thrown any light upon the results of his activity—must perceive, as much as his own cook does who prepares a dinner that will be devoured in an hour’s time, the same unsolved contradiction between the vanity and foolishness of all he has done, and the eternity and reasonableness of that which exists for ever. If they only think of it, each will see as clearly as the other; firstly, that the preservation of the integrity of Prince Bismarck’s dinner, as well as that of powerful Germany, is solely due: the preservation of the former—to the police, and the preservation of the latter—to the army; and that, so long only as both keep a good watch. Because there are famished people who would willingly eat the dinner, and nations which would fain be as powerful as Germany. Secondly, that neither Prince Bismarck’s dinner, nor the might of the German Empire, coincide with the aims and purposes of universal life, but that they are in flagrant contradiction with them. And thirdly, that as he who cooked the dinner, so also the might of Germany, will both very soon die, and that so shall perish, and as soon, both the dinner and Germany. That which shall survive alone is 208the Universe, which will never give one thought to either dinner or Germany, least of all to those who have cooked them.

As the intellectual condition of man increases, he comes to the idea that no happiness connected with his personality is an achievement, but only a necessity. Personality is only that incipient state from which begins life, and the ultimate limit of life....

Where, then, does life begin, and where does it end, I may be asked? Where ends the night, and where does day commence? Where, on the shore, ends the domain of the sea, and where does the domain of land begin?

There is day and there is night; there is land and there is sea; there is life and there is no life.

Our life, ever since we became conscious of it, is a pendulum-like motion between two limits.

One limit is, an absolute unconcern for the life of the infinite Universe an energy directed only toward the gratification of one’s own personality.

The other limit is a complete renunciation of that personality, the greatest concern with the life of the infinite Universe, in full accord with it, the transfer of all our desires and good will from one’s self, to that infinite Universe and all the creatures outside of us.^[51]

The nearer to the first limit, the less life and bliss, the closer to the second, the more life and bliss. Therefore, man is ever moving from one end to the other; i.e. he lives. This motion is life itself.

And when I speak of life, know that the idea of it is indissolubly connected in my conceptions with that of conscious life. No other life is known to me except conscious life, nor can it be known to anyone else.

We call life, the life of animals, organic life. But this is no life at all, only a certain state or condition of life manifesting to us.

But what is this consciousness or mind, the exigencies of which exclude personality and transfer the energy of man outside of him and into that state which is conceived by us as the blissful state of love?

What is conscious mind? Whatsoever we may be defining, we have to define it with our conscious mind. Therefore, with what shall we define mind?...

If we have to define all with our mind, it follows that conscious mind cannot be defined. Yet all of us, we not only know it, but it is the only thing which is given to us to know undeniably....

It is the same law as the law of life, of everything organic, animal or vegetable, with that one difference that we see the consummation of an intelligent law in the life of a plant. But the law of conscious mind, to which we are subjected as the tree, is subjected to its law, we see it not, but fulfil it....

209We have settled that life is that which is not our life. It is herein that lies hidden the root of error. Instead of studying that life of which we are conscious within ourselves, absolutely and exclusively—since we can know of nothing else—in order to study it, we observe that which is devoid of the most important factor and faculty of our life, namely, intelligent consciousness. By so doing, we act as a man who attempts to study an object by its shadow or reflection does.

If we know that substantial particles are subjected during their transformations to the activity of the organism; we know it not because we have observed or studied it, but simply because we possess a certain familiar organism united to us, namely the organism of our animal, which is but too well known to us as the material of our life; i.e. that upon which we are called to work and to rule by subjecting it to the law of reason.... No sooner has man lost faith in life, no sooner has he transferred that life into that which is no life, than he becomes wretched, and sees death.... A man who conceives life such as he finds it in his consciousness, knows neither misery, nor death: for all the good in life for him is in the subjection of his animal to the law of reason, to do which is not only in his power, but takes place unavoidably in him. The death of particles in the animal being, we know. The death of animals and of man, as an animal, we know; but we know nought about the death of conscious mind, nor can we know anything of it, just because that conscious mind is the very life itself. And Life can never be Death....

The animal lives an existence of bliss, neither seeing nor knowing death, and dies without cognizing it. Why then should man have received the gift of seeing and knowing it, and why should death be so terrible to him that it actually tortures his soul, often forcing him to kill himself out of sheer fear of death? Why should it be so? Because the man who sees death is a sick man, one who has broken the law of his life, and lives no longer a conscious existence. He has become an animal himself, an animal which also has broken the law of life.

The life of man is an aspiration to bliss, and that which he aspires to is given to him. The light lit in the soul of man is bliss and life, and that light can never be darkness, as there exists—verily there exists for man—only this solitary light which burns within his soul.soul.

We have translated this rather lengthy fragment from the Report of Count Tolstoi’s superb lecture, because it reads like the echo of the finest teachings of the universal ethics of true theosophy. His definition of life in its abstract sense, and of the life every earnest theosophist ought to follow, each according to, and in the measure of, his natural capacities—is the summary and the Alpha and the Omega of practical psychic, if not spiritual life. There are sentences in the lecture which, 210to the average theosophist will seem too hazy, and perhaps incomplete. Not one will he find, however, which could be objected to by the most exacting, practical occultist. It may be called a treatise on the Alchemy of Soul. For that “solitary” light in man, which burns for ever, and can never be darkness in its intrinsic nature, though the “animal” outside us may remains blind to it—is that “Light” upon which the Neo Platonists of the Alexandrian school, and after them the Rosecroix and especially the Alchemists, have written volumes, though to the present day their true meaning is a dark mystery to most men.

True, Count Tolstoi is neither an Alexandrian nor a modern theosophist; still less is he a Rosecroix or an Alchemist. But that which the latter have concealed under the peculiar phraseology of the Fire-philosophers, purposely confusing cosmic transmutations with Spiritual Alchemy, all that is transferred by the great Russian thinker from the realm of the metaphysical unto the field of practical life. That which Schelling would define as a realisation of the identity of subject and object in the man’s inner Ego, that which unites and blends the latter with the universal Soul—which is but the identity of subject and object on a higher plane, or the unknown Deity—all that Count Tolstoi has blended together without quitting the terrestrial plane. He is one of those few elect who begin with intuition and end with quasi-omniscience. It is the transmutations of the baser metals—the animal mass—into gold and silver, or the philosopher’s stone, the development and manifestation of man’s higher, Self which the Count has achieved. The alcahest of the inferior Alchemist is the All-geist, the all-pervading Divine Spirit of the higher Initiate; for Alchemy was, and is, as very few know to this day, as much a spiritual philosophy as it is a physical science. He who knows nought of one, will never know much of the other. Aristotle told it in so many words to his pupil, Alexander: “It is not a stone,” he said, of the philosopher’s stone. “It is in every man and in every place, and at all seasons, and is called the end of all philosophers,” as the Vedanta is the end of all philosophies.

To wind up this essay on the Science of Life, a few words may be said of the eternal riddle propounded to mortals by the Sphinx. To fail to solve the problem contained in it, was to be doomed to sure death, as the Sphinx of life devoured the unintuitional, who would live only in their “animal.” He who lives for Self, and only for Self, will surely die, as the higher “I” tells the lower “animal” in the Lecture. The riddle has seven keys to it, and the Count opens the mystery with one of the highest. For, as the author on “Hermetic Philosophy” beautifully expressed it: “The real mystery most familiar and, at the same time, most unfamiliar to every man, into which he must be initiated or perish as an atheist, is himself. For him is the elixir of life, to quaff which, before the discovery of the philosopher’s stone, is to drink the 211beverage of death, while it confers on the adept and the epopt, the true immortality. He may know truth as it really is—Aletheia, the breath of God, or Life, the conscious mind in man.”

This is “the Alcahest which dissolves all things,” and Count Tolstoi has well understood the riddle.

H. P. B.

SIN AGAINST LIFE.

A newspaper paragraph lately declared that a certain American lady of great wealth, residing in London, had conceived the strange desire to possess a cloak made of the soft warm down on the breasts of birds of Paradise. Five hundred breasts, it was said, were required for this purpose, and two skilful marksmen, the story went on to aver, had been sent to New Guinea to shoot the poor little victims whose wholesale slaughter must be accomplished to gratify this savage whim. We rejoice to observe that the whole statement has been flatly contradicted by the World, apparently on the best possible authority; but, however little the lady concerned may deserve the reproach which the authors of the calumny endeavoured to evoke against her, the feeling it may have excited is worth analysis in a world where, if bird of Paradise cloaks are rare, most women who dress luxuriously adorn themselves in one way or another at the expense of the feathered kingdom. The principle involved in a bonnet which is decorated with the plumage of a single bird, slaughtered for its sake, is the same as that which would be more grotesquely manifest in a garment that would require the slaughter of five hundred. Too many rich people in this greedy age forget that the grandest privilege of those who possess the means is that they have the power of alleviating suffering. Too many, again, forget that the sympathies of those who rule the animate world should extend beyond the limits of their own kind; and thus we have the painful spectacle of human “sport” associated in civilised countries still, with pursuits which should no longer afford pleasure to men who have emerged from the primitive life of hunters and fishers. But how is it possible, let us consider, to stoop lowest from the proud estate of humanity in search of ignoble gratification? It is bad to kill any sentient creature for the sake of the savage pleasures of the chase. It is bad, perhaps worse, to cause their destruction for the sake of coldly profiting by their slaughter, and it is bad to squander money in this hard world of want and wide-spread privation on costly personal indulgence. But the acme of all that is reprehensible in these various departments of ill-doing is surely reached when women—who should, by virtue of their sex, be helping to soften the ferocities of life—contrive to collect the cream of evil from each of these varieties, and to sin against a whole catalogue of human duties by cruel acquiescence in an unworthy fashion.

212

BROTHERHOOD.

The Theosophical Society has always placed in the forefront of its programme, as its first and most important object, the formation of the nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood, without distinction of race, creed, caste or sex. It would doubtless be incorrect to say that this object of the Society has been entirely overlooked in the West, but it is to be feared that not a few members of the Society have accepted it as an amiable formula, to which no objection could be raised, and have turned their attention almost exclusively to the two remaining objects. And yet, without some attempt to understand the true meaning of this Universal Brotherhood, it is idle to expect that any great services can be rendered to the cause of Theosophy. It may be useful to see whether any explanation can be given of the reason for the neglect of this first object, and whether such light may be thrown on its meaning, as may render the idea a living reality to many who now but faintly grasp its significance.

In the first place it may be said, that in many enlightened Western minds, there was already a familiarity with the idea thus enunciated. Christianity has always taught the “theoretical” equality in the sight of God, of all true believers, and politically the dogma of “equal rights” is practically beyond the reach of attack. The abolition of slavery, the extension of representative government, the spread of education, and perhaps also, in some degree, the influence of the scientific as opposed to the religious theories of the origin and destiny of man, have all combined to render this idea by no means difficult of apprehension, at least intellectually. Further its acceptance in this sense has not necessarily entailed any different view of the duties and responsibilities of life. In the East it cannot be said that this is the case. In India, the stringency of caste regulations causes class distinctions to assume a very definite form, while religious hatreds, if not more bitter than with us, enter more directly into the life of the people, and interpose stronger barriers between man and man than in Europe or America. Hence an Indian theosophist must, before he can accept the first object, even in its outward form, modify to some extent his intellectual conception of the relations in which he stands to the rest of mankind, and he will in his life give practical proof of the change. In his case the acceptance of the outward form can only follow on the appreciation of the inner meaning; that which results is that his theosophy is firmly founded on the principle of the Universal Brotherhood.

On the other hand, in the West, a familiarity with the external side 213seems, in many cases, to have prevented any attempt to go below the surface, and to have caused men to be satisfied with vague philanthropic sentimentality, effecting nothing, and leading nowhere.

What then is this Universal Brotherhood, which is the main spring of Theosophy? and what are its results?

Socialism as preached in this 19th century it certainly is not. Indeed, there would be little difficulty in shewing that modern materialistic Socialism is directly at variance with all the teachings of theosophy. Socialism advocates a direct interference with the results of the law of Karma, and would attempt to alter the dénouement of the parable of the talents, by giving to the man who hid his talent in a napkin, a portion of the ten talents acquired by the labour of his more industrious fellow.

Neither is it true that in practical benevolence is the whole idea of universal brotherhood exemplified, though doubtless that unselfish and unceasing work for the good of mankind, which is true philanthropy must of necessity be one result of it. The philanthropist may be, and no doubt often is, a true theosophist in all but name, though there is still much of what may be called unintelligent benevolence, the result of a mere emotional impulse; and again there is much that is the result of very decided and very narrow sectarian views, to which it would be absolutely impossible to apply the epithet universal. The devotion and self-sacrifice shown in many individual instances by Christian missionaries of various denominations, may be taken as fairly exemplifying philanthropy both of the unintelligent and the narrow type. They are prepared to make any sacrifice for what they believe to be the ultimate good of humanity, and in that sense are practising what some others only preach, namely true unselfishness, but they are often hampered by an intellectual inability to view both sides of the question, and fail thereby to acquire that understanding of, and sympathy with the difficulties and the wants of those whom they are endeavouring to aid, which are necessary preliminaries to any work of lasting usefulness. In a word, they too often fail to realise that unity in mankind which truly underlies all individualism. But having said so much, it must be added that an understanding of the real meaning of “Brotherhood” must entail active benevolence, that is to say work for others in some form or other, upon every one who does not wilfully thrust aside the obligation.

Where then are we to look for the explanation, and how are we to understand the spirit which must animate all true theosophists, if they are to realise and follow out the first rule of the Society? Not surely on the physical plane. Not by an attempt to force on the intellect as a fact to be accepted, or more truly a pill to be swallowed, a belief in similarities, equalities or identities, which have no existence. Only a realisation of what truly constitutes man can help us to form a conception of what brotherhood means.

Man is a complex organism as he exists on our earth to-day. He is 214partly transitory, partly eternal; in one sense the creature of circumstances, in another the creator of his own environment. But the true man, the underlying individuality is a reflection of the Divine. We are able to discern physical beauty, even when clad in rags. Is it impossible that we should also recognise the beauty of the soul, though it be for a time veiled beneath a gross material body? The physical body is indeed nothing but the garment of the ego, the true man; that momentarily suited to his needs and his deserts, the livery of his servitude, which must be worn, in ever changing forms, till the moment of his final emancipation. It is then beyond the physical, beyond the intellectual man, that we must look for that fraternity, arising out of unity and equality, which cannot be found on the purely material plane of existence. The divine soul of man, in which is posited his true individuality, is the real man, the immortal ego, which, through the accumulated experience of many earth lives is marching onward through the ages to its goal, reunion with the Infinite. What matters then the outward semblance, which our senses know as man? Our æsthetic perception may shrink from the rags, the dirt, the ugliness which belong to the physical environment. Our moral nature may revolt at association with vice, with low selfish courses of life, but within and behind all this we must endeavour to realise the continual presence of the immortal ego, one with us, as with all humanity, as sharing the divine nature, and ever struggling, as we are struggling, on the upward path that leads to the realisation of the Absolute. As Carlyle says in Sartor Resartus. “Mystical, more than magical, is that communing of Soul with Soul, both looking heavenward; here properly Soul first speaks with Soul; for only in looking heavenward, take it in what sense you may, not in looking earthward does what we can call Union, Mutual Love, Society, begin to be possible.”

It may be objected that in some cases it is impossible to recognise even the glimmerings of those higher aspirations, which are the tokens of the presence of the soul, the immortal ego. Such cases, however, must be comparatively rare. Still there are beings—it is almost impossible to call them human—who have so persistently concentrated all their efforts on the gratification of their lower consciousness, as to sever the frail link which binds them to their higher selves. Then the true man is no longer present in the human form, and brotherhood becomes an impossibility. But we may in truth almost ignore the existence of this type of mankind, for even when an intellectual materialism seems to be the sole ruling principle, we dare not deny the presence of that capacity for higher things which must exist in all who can still truly be called men.

Surely then it is in this view of our relations to our fellow men, that we shall find that guiding influence which may enable us to rise above the sordid considerations of our ordinary earthly existence. It is no 215sectarian belief that is here advanced; it is the essence of the teaching of Jesus, as it was of Gautama; nor is it a mere formula, to be accepted as an article of faith, and then laid on the shelf. Once understood, it must influence all who have sufficient strength of purpose to fight their own lower selfish personalities, and must lead them to the practical realisation of their aspirations towards true unselfishness and active benevolence.

But there lurks a danger even in the use of the word unselfishness. It has been the text of sermons from every pulpit in Christendom for centuries, and with what small results? No doubt the duty nearest at hand must not be neglected, and it is the duty of every one to do what he can to render those about him happier. But many stop there and consider that all their work consists in the practice of self-abnegation in their own small circle. Does not the broader view of human life here set forth suggest a new sphere of usefulness, and therefore of duty? It is for every man to determine what he can do for the good of humanity; all are not equally gifted, but all can do something. Some theosophists appear to be satisfied with intellectual study, or the development of their own spiritual nature, and neither of these two courses is to be neglected; but something more must be done. “It is more blessed to give than to receive,” and the acquirement of knowledge brings with it the obligation of spreading it. This is work from which none need shrink, and all who truly desire to work for Theosophy, which is in the highest sense “the religion of humanity,” will find the work ready to their hand, and be able to assist in bringing the Light “to them that sit in darkness.”

T. B. H.

PYTHAGORIC SENTENCES OF DEMOPHILUS.

Esteem that to be eminently good, which, when communicated to another, will be increased to yourself.

Be persuaded that those things are not your riches which you do not possess in the penetralia of the reasoning power.

As many passions of the soul, so many fierce and savage despots.

No one is free who has not obtained the empire of himself.

216

BLOOD-COVENANTING.^[52]

Particular attention has been recently directed to this subject of Blood-Covenant by the experiences of explorers in Africa, who appear to have discovered in that Dark Land some of the primitive facts the gory ghost of which has long haunted our European mind in the Eschatological phase.

Stanley, an especial sufferer from the practice, denounces the blood-brotherhood as a beastly cannibalistic ceremony. “For the fiftieth time my poor arm was scarified and my blood shed for the cause of civilization.” As the writer of this book observes: “The blood of a fair proportion of all the first families of equatorial Africa now courses in Stanley’s veins; and if ever there was an American citizen who could pre-eminently appropriate to himself the national motto ‘E pluribus unum,’ Stanley is the man.”

In his book, Dr. Trumbull has collected a mass of data from a wide range of sources to illustrate what he terms the “Primitive rite of covenanting by the inter-transfusion of blood.”

Dr. Trumbull is anxious to make the efficacy of the rite depend upon the recognition of a vivifying virtue in the blood itself, as the essence of life. But such recognition appears to have been remote enough from the Primitive thought. The Aborigines were not Jews or Christians. They gave of their life without always thinking of the exact equivalent or superior value received. They gave it as the witness to the troth they plighted and the covenant which they intended to keep. His theory of interpretation is that there was a dominating and universal conviction that the “blood is the life; that blood-transfer is soul-transfer, and that blood-sharing, human or divine-human, secures an inter-union of natures; and that a union of the human nature with the divine is the highest ultimate attainment reached out after by the most primitive, as well as the most enlightened, mind of humanity.”

His collection of facts may serve a most useful purpose as eye-openers to other people (and for other facts to follow), just as they appear to have been to himself. The book is interesting, if not profound; and nothing that follows in this article is intended to decry it, or to prevent the readers of Lucifer from looking into it if they do not feel too great a “scunner” at sight of the gilded-gory illustration on the cover. But the work is written by one who talks to us out of a window of Noah’s Ark, and who still seems to think the Hebrew Bible is the rim of the universe. 217We value and recommend the book solely for its facts, not for its theories, nor for its bibliolatry.

In all studies of this kind which make use of the word “Primitive,” it is the fundamental facts that we first need; and next a first-hand acquaintanceship with all the facts, so that we may do our own thinking for ourselves and strike our light within by which we can read the facts without, as the primary and essential procedure in the endeavour to attain the truth.

Also the facts may be genuine and honestly presented, yet the interpretation may be according to an inadequate or a “bogus” theory. The truth is that no bibliolator can be trusted to interpret the past of our race now being unveiled by evolution. He is born and begotten with the blinkers on. His mode of interpretation is to get behind us, to lay the hands upon our eyes in front, and ask us to listen whilst he gives us his views of the past! But the non-evolutionist cannot interpret the past from lack of a true standpoint with regard to the beginnings or rather the processes of becoming. He can begin anywhere and at any time short of the starting-point. There is nothing for it but to break away, and turn round to see for ourselves whether the traditionary vision of the Blinkerists be true or false. The facts alone are the final determinatives of the Truth. But we must have the whole of them and not a few, whether judiciously or Jesuitically selected to support a Christian theory. Whereas, the object and aim of this work,work, the bias of the writer, and the trend of his arguments, are all on the line of showing or suggesting that the blood-covenant was the result of some innate instinct or divine revelation which prefigured and foreshadowed, and may be taken to indicate and authorize, the Christian scheme of atonement, and the remission of sin by the shedding of innocent blood. The writer asserts that this primitive symbolism was “made a reality in Jesus Christ” in whom “God was to give of his blood in the blood of his Son for the revivifying of the sons of Abraham in the Blood of the Eternal Covenant.” But it can be demonstrated that the covenant by blood did not commence where Dr. Trumbull begins—with a religious yearning God-ward for the establishing of a brotherhood between the human nature and the Divine. The root-idea was not that of an “inter-union of the spiritual natures by the inter-commingling of blood for the sake of an inter-communion with deity.” That, at least, was by no means the “primitive rite,” which the blood-covenant is here called. The many forms of the blood-covenant can only be unified at the root, i.e., in the beginning, not at the end. They are not to be understood apart from the primitive language of signs, as in Tattoo, the very primitive biology of the early observers, and the most primitive sociology of the Totemic times.

Time was, and may be still, when the blood-covenant would often serve as the one protection against being killed and eaten. Even the 218cannibals will not partake of their own Totemic brothers. Also the covenant was extended to certain animals which were made of kin and held to be sacred as brothers of the blood.

The Blood-covenant takes many forms besides that of the blood-brotherhood, which are not to be explained by this writer’s theory of exchange.

When the blood of an African woman accidentally spurted into the eye of Dr. Livingstone, she claimed him for her blood relation, without there being any exchange of blood for blood.

Dr. Trumbull claims the Egyptians as witnesses to the truth of his interpretation. But so far from their highest conception of “a union with the Divine nature” being an inter-flowing and interfusion of blood, the soul of blood was the very lowest, that is the first, in a series of seven souls!

Their highest type of the soul was the sun that vivified for ever called Atmu, the Father Soul.^[53] The bases of natural fact which lie at the foundation of the Blood-covenant, preceded any and all such ideas as those postulated by the writer as being extant from the first, such as “a longing for oneness of life with God;” an “out-reaching after inter-union and inter-communion with God.” There was no conception of a one God extant in the category of human consciousness when the rites of a blood-covenant were first founded. There could be no atonement where there was no sense of sin or a breaking of the law. All through, the writer is apt to confuse the past with the present, and eager to read the present into the past.^[54]

The real roots of matters like these are to be found only in certain facts of nature which were self-revealing, and not in the sphere of concepts and causation! And it is only when we can reach the natural genesis of primitive customs and fetishtic beliefs, and trace their lines of descent, that we can understand and interpret their meaning in the latest symbolical and superstitious phase of religious rites. Nothing can be more fatally false than to interpret the physics of the past by means of modern 219metaphysic, with the view of proving that certain extant doctrines of delusion are the lineal descendants of an original Divine revelation, which has been bound up in two Testaments for the favoured few.

The blood-covenant is undoubtedly a primitive rite; but the author of this work does not penetrate to its most primitive or significant phases. These are not to be read by the light of Hebrew revelation, but by the light of nature if at all. Many primitive customs and rites survived amongst the Semites, but they themselves were not amongst the aboriginal races of the world. We have to get far beyond their stage to understand the meaning of the myths, legends, rites, and customs, that were preserved by them as sacred survivals from the remoter past. The symbolical and superstitious phases of custom cannot be directly explained on the spot where we may first meet with them in going back. In becoming symbolical they had already passed out of their primary phase, and only indirectly represent the natural genesis of the truly primitive rite. I have spent the best part of my life in tracking these rites and customs to their natural origin, and in expounding the typology and symbols by which the earliest meaning was expressed.

What then was the root-origin of a blood-covenant? The primary perceptions of primitive or archaic men included the observation that they came from the mother, and first found themselves at her breast.

Next they saw that the child was fleshed by the mother, and formed from her blood, the flow of which was arrested to be solidified, and take form in their own persons. Thus the red amulet which was worn by the Egyptian dead, was representative of the blood of Isis, who came from herself, and made her own child without the fatherhood, when men could only derive their blood and descent from the mother. This amulet was put on by her, says Plutarch, when she found herself enceinte with Horus, her child, who was derived from the mother alone, or was traced solely to the blood of Isis. Primitive men could perceive that the children of one mother were of the same blood. This, the first form of a blood-brotherhood, was the first to be recognised as the natural fact. Uterine brothers were blood-brothers. The next stage of the brotherhood was Totemic; and the mode of extending the brotherhood to the children of several mothers implies, as it necessitated, some form of symbolic rite which represented them as brothers, or as typically becoming of the one blood. Here we can track the very first step in sociology which was made when the typical blood-brotherhood of the Totem was formed in imitation of the natural brotherhood of the mother-blood. The modes and forms of the Covenant can be identified by the Totemic mysteries, some of which yet survive in the crudest condition. The brotherhood was entered at the time of puberty; that is, at the time of re-birth, when the boy was re-born as a man, and the child of the mother attained the soul of the fatherhood, and was permitted 220to join the ranks of the begetters. The mystery is one with that of Horus, child of the mother alone, who comes to receive the soul of the father in Tattu, the region of establishing the son as the father, which is still extant in the mysteries, and the symbolism of Tattoo.

This re-birth was enacted in various ways by typically re-entering the womb. One of these was by burial in the earth, the tomb or place of re-birth being the image of the maternal birth-place all the world over. Thus when the Norsemen or other races prepared a hole under the turf, and buried their cut and bleeding arms to let the blood flow, and commingle in one as the token of a covenant, they were returning typically to the condition of uterine twins, and the act of burial for the purpose of a re-birth was a symbolical mode of establishing the social brotherhood upon the original grounds of the natural brotherhood of blood. Thus the blood-covenant did not originate in the set transfusion or inter-fusion of blood. In the Totemic mysteries the pubescent lad was admitted by the shedding of his blood, with or without any interchange. The blood itself was the symbol of brotherhood, and the shedding of it was the seal of a covenant.

Nor was this merely because flesh was formed of blood, or the first men were made of the mystical red soil, as with the aarea of the Tahitians, or the red earth of the Adamic man. Most of these primitive rites, the Blood-Covenant included, had their starting-point from the period of puberty. It was at this time the lads who were not brothers uterine were made brothers of the Totem at what was termed the festival of young-man-making. The proper period for circumcision, or cutting and sealing, as still practised by the oldest aborigines, is the time of puberty, the natural coming of age. It is then they enter the Totemic Brotherhood. Now in Egyptian, the word khet or khut = cut, means to cut and to seal. Khetem is to enclose, bind, seal, and is applied to sealing. The same root passes into Assyrian and Hebrew as Khatan, Katam or Chatan, with the same meaning. In Arabic, Khatana is to circumcise. Cutting and sealing are identical as the mode of entering into a Blood-Covenant. Circumcision was one form of the sealing, but there were various kinds of cuts employed, and different parts of the body were scarified and tattooed. In the primary phase, then, the blood-brotherhood was established by the shedding of blood; the register was written in blood, and instead of the covenant being witnessed by the seal of red wax, it was stamped in blood.

The reason for phallic localization is to be sought in the fact that the young men not only entered the Brotherhood by the baptism of blood, they were also received into the higher ranks of the fathers, and sworn in to live an orderly, legal and cleanly life, henceforth, as the pro-creators and loyal preservers of the race.

But this was not the only clue directly derived from nature. There is another reason why blood should have become the sacred sign of a 221covenant. Amongst many primitive races blood, or the colour red, is the symbol of Tapu, the sign of sanctity. The bones of the dead were covered with red ochre as a means of protection by the most widely scattered races in the world. The stamp of a red hand on the building, or a crimson daub upon the gravestone will render them sacred. The Kaffirs will wash their bodies with blood as a protection against being wounded in battle. The colour of robin-redbreast still renders him tapu or sacred to English children.

Blood having become a sign of that which is true and sacred, on account of the Covenant, it is then made the symbol of all that is sacred. It can be used for the purpose of anointing the living or the dead, can be the seal of the marriage or other ceremonies and rites of covenanting. It is the primæval token of tapu.

As I have elsewhere shown, blood was sworn by as the type of that which was true, the primary one of the typical Two Truths of Egypt. It was so in all the mysteries, and is so to-day, including the mysteries of Masonry. I have suggested the derivation of the masonic name from the Egyptian Sen = son, for blood and brotherhood. The working Mason in Egyptian is the makh (makht) by name. Makh means to work, inlay by rule and measure. We see that makh modifies into mâ for measure, and for that which is just and true.

Mâ-sen = Mason, would denote the true brotherhood; and as sen is also blood, the true brotherhood as the blood-brotherhood would be the masons in the mystical or occult sense. Red is the colour of Mâ or Truth personified, and sen is blood. Blood is sworn by because it is the colour of truth, or the true colour. Now in old English the word seng means both “blood” and “true.” Here, then, we find the origin of the oath, which constitutes the supreme expression in the vocabulary of our English roughs, when they use the oath of the blood-covenant, and swear by the word “bloody!” When they wax emphatic, everything they say becomes “bloody true.” This is the exact equivalent of “seng it is” for “it is true.” According to the primitive mysteries, this mode of swearing, or establishing the covenant, was sacred whilst kept piously secret, and it becomes impious when made public or profane. Such mysteries were very simply natural at first, and it was this primitive simplicity and nearness to nature which demanded the veil to protect them from the gaze of the later consciousness. Time was when the English felon would carry a red handkerchief with him to the scaffold, and hold it in his hand as a signal that he had betrayed no secrets, but died “bloody true,” or true blood.

These customs were symbolical, but there is a hint of the blood-covenant beyond them—a hint received direct from Nature herself—call it revelation if you please. In the first rude ethics we find that the time for the sexes to come together was recognised by the intimation of nature, made in her own sign-language at the period of feminine 222pubescence. Nature gave the hint, and a covenant was established. Henceforth, the child that could not enter that covenant would be protected from brutal assault, and was allowed, or rather compelled, to run about unclothed in token of her exemption. It is here in the swearing-in and covenanting of the sexes at the time of pubescence that we discover another real and most secret, i.e., sacred root of the rite.

The self-revelation made by nature to primitive man was very primitive in its kind. She not only demonstrated that the blood was the life, or that the life passed away with the letting out of the blood, but in another domain, which our author has not entered, she showed that blood was, and how it was, the future life. Blood was the primary witness to the future life which the child received from the mother. It was the token of the time when the female could become the bearer of that future life which took flesh and form in her blood.

The blood-covenanting of the primitive races is still a part of the most elaborate system of making presents, which are the express witnesses of proffered troth and intended fealty. The most precious or sacred things are parted from in proof. The best is given on either side. And in the offering of blood, they were giving their very life, that in which the best attains supremacy. But these primitive rites can never be truly read except by those who are deeply grounded in the fact, and well acquainted with the evidence, that sign-language was primordial, that gestures preceded verbal speech, and acting was an earlier mode of representing than talking. Primitive men could only do that which we can say. In Egyptian that which is said is done. And in these primitive customs and religious rites we see the early races of men performing in pantomime the early drama of dumb or inarticulate humanity. And it seems as if this primitive language could produce an impression and reach a reality that are unapproachable by means of words. The significance of the teaching went all the deeper when it was incised in the flesh and branded into the blood. For example, what a terrific glimpse of reality is revealed by the fact that the Malagasy make their sign of a blood-covenant by an incision in the skin that covers the bosom, and this opening with its utterance of blood is called ambavfo, the “mouth of the heart.” Thus the covenant is made in the blood, which is the very life, uttering itself with the mouth of the heart. In Egyptian the covenant, the oath, and the life, have the same name of Ankhu; and the greatest oath was to swear by the life or the blood of the Pharaoh. The primitive mode was to slash the flesh and let the hot blood spout and speak for itself with the “mouth of the heart,” the utterance of the living letter and red seal of the wound, as true witness.

No verbal covenant or written record of the modern races has ever had the full force and effect of these modes of covenanting amongst the primitive people of the past. The moderns do not keep their word 223with anything like the inviolable sanctity of the aborigines; when once they are sworn to fealty, the covenant is almost never broken. Few things in poetry are more pathetic than the story related of Tolo, a chief of the Shastika Indians on the Pacific Coast. In the year 1852 he entered into a tribal treaty with Colonel McKee and was desirous of making a covenant for life in some way that could not possibly be violated. Instead of exchanging blood he proposed a transfer of their own two personal names. Henceforth he was to be known as McKee, and the Colonel as Tolo. But the treaty was discarded, the covenant was not kept by the American Government. In reply, the Indian cast off the title of McKee and refused to resume his own tarnished and degraded name of Tolo! He considered that his very identity was lost by this mode of losing his good name! I doubt whether 1,800 years of Christianity have evolved in the later races of men a consciousness of truth, probity, and loyalty, so quick and profound as that!

The writer of this book remains stone-blind to its own teachings with regard to the doctrine of survivals, and of the past persisting as a pattern for the present.

To quote his own words, he rejoices in the “blessed benefits of the covenant of blood,” and is still a fervent supporter of the great delusion inculcated by the gospel of ruddy gore.

The doctrine is fundamentally the same whether the Greek murderer was cleansed from his guilt by the filthy purification of pig’s blood or the modern sinner is supposed to be washed white in the Blood of the Lamb.

As I had already written in my “Natural Genesis,” “the religious ritual of the moderns is crowded like a kitchen-midden with the refuse relics of customs that were natural once, and are now clung to as if they were supernatural in their efficacy because their origin has been unknown. Indeed, the current masquerade in these appurtenances of the past is as sorry a sight to the archaic student as are the straw crowns and faded finery of the kings and queens whose domain is limited to the lunatic asylum.” Dr. Trumbull endorses the doctrine that “Mortals gave the blood of their first-born sons in sacrifice to the Supreme Being, then the Supreme Being gave the blood of his first-born male in sacrifice” for men; and there you have the covenant of blood in its final form!

It is true that first-born children were offered in sacrifice just as the first take of fish was returned to the waters with a lively sense of future favours from the Typhonian power thus propitiated, but where is the sense of talking about the thought of an intercommunion with the divine nature through a blood-union with God as a concept in the mind of primitive man? It is true the recognized nature-powers, or devils of physical force, were invoked with blood, but what was the status of these powers when the beasts of blood were their representatives on earth, and the blood, which is the life, was given to the Serpent, for instance, as the 224likeness of life itself because it sloughed its own skin and manifested the enviable power of self-renewal? The profounder and more fundamental our researches, the more clearly does it become apparent that we have been victimised by the unsuspected survival of the past in the present, and that the veriest leavings of primitive man have been palmed off upon us by the ignorant as sacred mysteries and revelations guaranteed to be original and divine. Continually we find that our errors of belief are based upon very simple truths that have been misunderstood through a misinterpretation of primitive matters and modes of representation by means of modern ignorance. The blood-covenant of the aboriginal races has undoubtedly survived and culminated as Christian in the frightful formula, “Without blood there is no remission of sin.” Not merely the blood of beasts or human creatures this time, but the ruddy life and ichor of a supposed Divine Being, who was made flesh on purpose to pour out the blood for Almighty vengeance to lap in the person of a gory ghost of God. One of the seven primal powers in Egypt was represented by the hawk, because it drank blood. One of the Seven in Akkad was the vampire. And this type of blood-drinking has been divinised at last as the Christian God.

Pindar says: “It is impossible for me to call one of the blessed gods a cannibal.” But the Christian scheme makes the Only God a cannibal, who offers the flesh and blood of his own Son and Very Self as sacrificial food made sacred for his followers. Such a god is, in two senses, chimerical. How natural an accompaniment is the picture of the Crucified Christ to the Zuni saying, “My Father, this day shalt thou refresh thyself with blood!” Such a doctrine is but an awful shadow of the primitive past—the shadow, so to say, of our old earth in the very far-off past—that remains to eclipse the light of Heaven to-day, and darken the souls of men in the present through the survival of savage spiritualism in its final Christian phase, where the extant doctrines are little more than an ignorant perversion of the most primitive knowledge.

It is in this final and not in the primitive phase that we shall identify the irrationalityirrationality, the impiety, the disgusting grossness of Mythology under the surface of theological varnish and veneer. The only senselessness is in the survival of Myths without their sense.

Lastly, it is observable that in the genuine rite the covenant-makers always bled directly and suffered each for themselves. Later on we find that other victims were substituted by purchase, by fraud, or by force; hence the blood-covenant by proxy. Now the Christian scheme is that which culminated in the blood-covenant and atonement by proxy. “His offspring for his life he gave,” is said of an Akkadian ruler who sacrificed his own son as an expiatory offering to save himself from the consequences of his own sin. And this doctrine of the despicable, this type of the fatherhood, is elevated to the status of divinity by Dr. Trumbull. To quote his own words, the inspired author of the narrative 225found in the Hebrew Genesis shows “Abel lovingly and trustfully reaching out toward God with substitute blood!”

And there began for the Historic Christians that vast perversion of a primitive custom which culminated at last in the Christian doctrine of vicarious sacrifice, based upon the mythology of the Old Testament being literalized in the New. Now we have the ludicrous spectacle of salvation by means of a rite which has lost all the manhood, all the morality, all the meaning, that was put into it by the despised races of uncivilized men.

The eucharistic rite is incredibly primitive when really understood. The bread and wine of the Christian sacrament still represent the male spirit and the female source of life. The “Blood of Jesus,” which was to be “drink indeed,” is identical with the “Blood of Bacchus,” which preceded historic Christianity, and has been substituted for the human or animal blood of the earlier mysteries. Imbibing the blood of the Christ did not originate in any historic or personal transaction. Also the blood of Christ, or Mithras, or Horus, employed in drinking the covenant, was preceded by the blood of Charis. In some of the Gnostic mysteries we have the proof that the first form of the saving blood was feminine, not masculine at all. Irenæus presents us with a picture of profound interest from the anthropological point of view.

He tells us how Marcus performed the eucharistic rite with the blood of Charis, instead of the blood of Christ. He handed cups to the women and bade them consecrate these in his presence. Then, by the use of magical incantation, “Charis was thought to drop her own blood into the cup” thus consecrated. (B. I. 13, 2.)

There is but one known fact in natural phenomena which will fitly account as Vera Causa for a monthly Sacrament, celebrated every twenty-eight days, or thirteen times to the year; which fact was commemorated by the Blood-Covenant of Charis ( Vide “Nat. Gen.” V. ii. section 12, for proofs). This kind of blood-covenant can be paralleled in the Yain or Yonian mysteries of India.

When rightly understood, the eucharist is a survival of the “beastly cannibalistic ceremony,” whether considered as the blood of Charis or the blood of Christ, or partaken of as the red Tent wine or the “bloody wafer” of Rome.

We welcome Dr. Trumbull’s contribution on the subject, although he has but “breathed a vein” of it, because these rites and customs have to be unveiled, and when they are at last exposed in all the simplicity of naked nature the erroneous ideas read into them, the delusive inferences drawn from them, the false illusions painted upon the veil that concealed the truth about them, will be doomed to pass away. To explain the true is the only effectual mode of exploding the false.

Gerald Massey.

226

Correspondence.

CORRESPONDENCE ADDRESSED TO THE AUTHOR OF “LIGHT ON THE PATH.”

I.

“What are the senses called astral, in reality? Are they not really spiritual, seizing on the inner essence of things and interpreting it. The ordinary psychic or clairvoyant surely does not use the astral senses? Yet he sees things which we do not see. It would be well to explain this.”

B. K.

A. The senses called astral in the comments on “Light on the Path” are the senses which perceive the inner essence, certainly; which are cognisant of the life underlying every form of matter. The ordinary psychic or clairvoyant only perceives other forms of matter than those we ordinarily see, and perceives them as a child perceives the forms in this world at first, without understanding their meaning. The astral senses carry beyond matter, and enlighten man with regard to any form of life which especially interests him. They show the poet painter, and composer the things they express to other men, who regard these great ones as beings of another order—beings with the gift of genius. So they are, and the vigour of that genius carries them on into the inner life where meaning, and harmony, and the indefinable all-desired are to be perceived. Wordsworth saw it in nature, he recognised the “spirit in the woods”—not the wood-nymphs but the divine spirit of peace which teaches a lesson in life. Richard Jeffries saw it in nature, too, as perhaps no other man ever has seen it; through the finite visible world he perceived the infinite invisible one, and before he died he had begun to know that the visible world does not exist. Turner, perhaps, is the only parallel. By the invisible world I must repeat again that I do not mean what the spiritualists call by that name—a new world of other forms. I mean the formless world. It is the farthest limit man’s consciousness can reach to; and only the pure and star-like soul can become even aware of its existence. It is not man’s divine nature, but the man who enters it with any reverence for the great miracle of life can only do so by the aid of his divine nature, whether as a poet, a painter, or an occultist. The soul which enters it without reverence is unable to endure its extreme rarity of atmosphere and turns to the psychic-astral in which to live; such men become madmen and suicides, more or less pronounced, as men do who refuse to dwell in any form of physical life but the grossest and simplest. There is some law of life which impels men onward—call it evolution or developement or what you will; and a man can no more go downwards without suffering than a tree can be placed with its branches in the ground, instead of its roots, without discomfort, and in the end, death.

I propose to use two phrases which have been suggested to me; the psychicpsychic-astral and the divine-astral. This seems the only way to make my meaning clear, 227for the word astral has two meanings, its own proper derivative one, from the Sanskrit stri to strew light, and that given it by the use of all occultists. Paracelsus appropriated the word for all things sidereal, subject to the moon and stars, part and parcel of this material universe, even though formed as Dryden says of “purest atoms of the air.” In this sense the spiritualists and psychics have the right of custom to use it as they do, to describe their world of finer forms. In this meaning an astral shape is the form of the human soul, still in possession of the passions which make it human; and the astral senses perceive not the subtle and supreme glory which Shelley seized on in Prometheus, but a region full of shapes and forms differing but little from those we now wear, and still distinctly material.

The “astral man” in the “Comments on Light on the Path” should have been written the divine-astral man, according to this evident difference of meaning between the present writer and all other writers on occultism.

II.

“Are not the astral senses used by every great poet or inventor though he does not see clairvoyantly at all? i.e. does not see elementals, astral pictures, forms, &c.”

Faust.

The answer to the former question seems to contain the answer to this, which is clearly prompted by a conception of the word “astral” in its divine sense.

III.

1. “There is a law of nature which insists that a man shall read these mysteries for himself. Will all men seeking the occult path read these mysteries alike, or will each man find the interpretation peculiarly adapted to his own phrase of development. No two men read the mysteries contained in the Bhagavat Gita quite alike, each gains the glimpses of light which he is able to assimilate and no more.”

A. This seems to be rather a statement of a truth than a question which can be answered in any way other than putting it into different words, perhaps not so good.

2. “Is the outer world the reflection of the world within? like a shadowed reproduction in clumsy form, the inner being reality?”

A. This is what should be. But materialists have brought their sense of reality into the shadowed life.

3. “How is the intuition to be developed which enables one to grasp swift knowledge?”

A. To me no way is known but that of living the life of a disciple.

4. “Can the laws in super-nature only act on their own plane, or can their reflection be brought down intact in their own purity to govern physical life.”

A. Surely this must be so; yet rarely, for when it is accomplished the man would be divine, a Buddha!

5. “To be incapable of tears”—does not that mean that the physical emotions, being merged into the inner physical, that tears are impossible as being an outward phase of the physical nature—whereas the psychical emotions, to use a physical term are vibratory.

A. “The whole of ‘Light on the Path,’ is written in an astral cipher” is stated 228at the outset of the “comments;” the word “tears” does not refer to physical tears in any way.

It is the only word which will convey any idea whatever of the moisture of life, that which bursts from the human soul in its experience of sensation and emotion, and in the passion of its hunger for them.

6. “How is one to take the snake of self in a steady grasp and conquer it?”

W.

A. This is the great mystery which each man must solve for himself.

IV.

Wallasey, Oct. 1st

Referring to the comments on “Light on the Path,” in the first number of Lucifer, may I ask whether the full paradox “Before the eyes can see they must be incapable of tears, and yet no eyes incapable of tears can see,” i.e., see good or God, is not truer and stronger than its part?

“Therefore the soul of the occultist must become stronger than joy and greater than sorrow” I presume means that he must not seek joy or fear sorrow, not that he may not enjoy nor sorrow?

The phrase by itself may read “Before the eyes can see they must be incapable of tears,” tearless, dry, in fact dead! which is obviously not the author’s intention in “Light on the Path.”

Yours truly,

A. E. I.

A. Once more I must refer to the preliminary statement in the comments that “Light on the Path,” is written in an astral cipher, and that tears do not mean the tears of the physical body, but the rain drops that come from the passion-life of the human soul. These being stayed for ever, the astral sight is no longer blinded or blurred. Divine love and charity then find room, when personal desire is gone. Joy and sorrow, for oneself, then drop naturally into another place than that which they filled before.

V.

(1.) I desire very strongly to obtain conquest over “self;” would my using the occult means for so doing, which apparently to me lie without the ordinary experience of Christians, necessitate my sacrificing any iota of my belief in the power of Christ?

(2.) If I submit myself to the occult conditions under which the four first rules in “Light on the Path” may be “engraved on my heart and life;” will these conditions permit me to pray throughout for the Divine help and strength of the Eternal Christ, who has passed the portal, opened the “way,” and whom I believe to be the “Master of Masters,” the “Lord of Angels”?

(3.) Do the words—“the disciple” ... “must then so shut the gates of his soul that no comforter can enter there nor any enemy”—mean, that we are wilfully to exclude ourselves from any desire for the sympathy, strength, and support of the spirit of One who said “No man cometh unto the Father but by Me,” and who drank the cup of agony to the very dregs for love of the Brotherhood?

L. H. Ff.

229A. (1.) Not any iota of your belief in the power of the Christ-spirit would or should be sacrificed; it would rather increase, for that spirit is the same Divine overshadowing which has inspired every Redeemer.

(2.) It matters very little by what name you call the Master of Masters, so that you do appeal to “Its” power throughout.

(3.) Man can find no comforter save in the Divine Spirit within himself. Does not the tale of the life of Jesus illustrate this, looking at it from one point of view? In what dread isolation he lived and died; His disciples, even those who were most beloved by Him, could not reach His spirit in its sublime moments, or in the hours of its keenest suffering. So with every one who raises himself by effort above the common life of man, in however small a degree. Solitude becomes a familiar state, for nothing personal, not even a personal God, can comfort or cheer any longer.

VI.

“Is there any chance of self-deception? May one enter the path so gradually as to be conscious of no radical change, representing a change of life or stage of progression? How is it with one who has never experienced a great and lasting sorrow, or an all-absorbing joy, but who in the midst of both joy and sorrow strives to remember others, and to feel that he hardly deserves the joy, and that his sorrow is meagre in the presence of the great all-pain? How is such a one to enter through the gates? By what sign shall he know them?”

Y. H.

A. It is difficult for such a one to know anything of what lies beneath the surface of his nature until it has been probed by the fiercer experiences of life. But, of course, the theory of re-incarnation makes it possible that such experiences are left behind in the past. The entrance to the gates is marked by one immutable sign; the sense that personal joy or sorrow no longer exist. The disciple lives for humanity, not for himself; works for all creatures that suffer instead of knowing that he himself has pain.

“ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.”

“As the Editors of Lucifer kindly invite questions concerning Theosophy and kindred subjects, an honest enquirer into these matters would welcome an answer to the following difficulty:

“In his book on ‘Esoteric Buddhism,’ Mr. Sinnett states that souls or spirits pass the long interval between the one incarnation and another in a sort of quiescent, and at least half-unconscious, state, losing enough of their identity to preclude their carrying any recollection of one incarnation on to the next. In his novel, “Karma,” Mr. Sinnett represents one character, Mrs. Lakesby, gifted with more than usual powers, as being very fond, when she has the chance, of allowing her spirit to escape from the trammels of the body and 230meeting the spirits of departed—that is, dead friends—“and others” on the Astral plane where she holds agreeable converse with them.

“How are these two statements reconcilable?

“October 22nd, 1887.

N. D.”

Mr. Sinnett would probably reply that the answer could only be given fully by reprinting all that he has written in various published works, on the conditions of existence in Kama-Loca, and Devachan, and on the higher and lower aspects of Self. The normal course of events will conduct a human being who quits the material body through Kama-Loca to the Devachanic state, in which Mrs. Lakesby would not be able to interview him. But while in Kama-Loca she might at least imagine she did this, and, perhaps not too wisely, indulgeindulge in the practice of so doing. If we remember rightly the Baron, in “Karma,” who is represented as knowing a good deal more than Mrs. Lakesby, gifted as she is, throws some discredit upon her view concerning the Astral plane and its inhabitants. At the best when a clairvoyant can gain touch with a soul in Kama-Loca, it is the lower self remaining there, though it has left the body, that she deals with. And though that lower self may be very recognisable for people who have known it in the earthly manifestation, it will be lower than the lower self of earth and not higher because ethereal. That is to say on earth the living man is more or less under the guidance of his higher self. But the higher has no longer any business to transact with the lower self of Kama-Loca, and does not manifest there at all.