[434] See Rawlinson, vol. xvii., pp. 30-32, Revised edition.

[435] Jowett: Introduction to “Timæus,” “Dial. of Plato,” vol. i., p. 509.

[436] N. B.—He lived in the first century B. C.

[437] Stobæus: “Eclogues.”

[438] Kieser: “Archiv.,” vol. iv., p. 62. In fact, many of the old symbols were mere puns on names.

[439] See “Rig-Vedas,” the Aitareya-Brahmanan.

[440] Brahma is also called by the Hindu Brahmans Hiranyagarbha or the unit soul, while Amrita is the supreme soul, the first cause which emanated from itself the creative Brahma.

[441] Marbod: “Liber lapid. ed Beekmann.”

[442] “The Sun and the Earth,” Lecture by Prof. Balfour Stewart.

[443] “La Loi Naturelle,” par Volney.

[444] “Diction. Philosophique,” Art. “Philosophie.”

[445] “Boston Lecture,” December, 1875.

[446] Weber: “Ind. Stud.,” i. 290.

[447] Wilson: “Rig-Veda Sanhita,” ii. 143.

[448] “Duncker,” vol. ii., p. 162.

[449] “Wultke,” ii. 262.

[450] Daniel vii. 9, 10.

[451] Book of Enoch, xiv. 7, ff.

[452] This proposition, which will be branded as preposterous, but which we are ready to show, on the authority of Plato (see Jowett’s Introd. to “the Timæus;” last page), as a Pythagorean doctrine, together with that other of the sun being but the lens through which the light passes, is strangely corroborated at the present day, by the observations of General Pleasonton of Philadelphia. This experimentalist boldly comes out as a revolutionist of modern science, and calls Newton’s centripetal and centrifugal forces, and the law of gravitation, “fallacies.” He fearlessly maintains his ground against the Tyndalls and Huxleys of the day. We are glad to find such a learned defender of one of the oldest (and hitherto treated as the most absurd) of hermetic hallucinations (?) (See General Pleasonton’s book, “The Influence of the Blue Ray of the Sunlight, and of the Blue Color of the Sky, in developing Animal and Vegetable Life,” addressed to the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture.)

[453] In no country were the true esoteric doctrines trusted to writing. The Hindu Brahma Maia, was passed from one generation to another by oral tradition. The Kabala was never written; and Moses intrusted it orally but to his elect. The primitive pure Oriental gnosticism was completely corrupted and degraded by the different subsequent sects. Philo, in the “de Sacrificiis Abeli et Caini,” states that there is a mystery not to be revealed to the uninitiated. Plato is silent on many things, and his disciples refer to this fact constantly. Any one who has studied, even superficially, these philosophers, on reading the institutes of Manu, will clearly perceive that they all drew from the same source. “This universe,” says Manu, “existed only in the first divine idea, yet unexpanded, as if involved in darkness, imperceptible, indefinable, undiscoverable by reason, and undiscovered by revelation, as if it were wholly immersed in sleep; then the sole self-existing Power himself undiscerned, appeared with undiminished glory, expanding his idea, or dispelling the gloom.” Thus speaks the first code of Buddhism. Plato’s idea is the Will, or Logos, the deity which manifests itself. It is the Eternal Light from which proceeds, as an emanation, the visible and material light.

[454] It appears that in descending from Mont Blanc, Tyndall suffered severely from the heat, though he was knee-deep in the snow at the time. The Professor attributed this to the burning rays of the sun, but Pleasonton maintains that if the rays of the sun had been so intense as described, they would have melted the snow, which they did not; he concludes that the heat from which the Professor suffered came from his own body, and was due to the electrical action of sunlight upon his dark woolen clothes, which had become electrified positively by the heat of his body. The cold, dry ether of planetary space and the upper atmosphere of the earth became negatively electrified, and falling upon his warm body and clothes, positively electrified, evolved an increased heat (see “The Influence of the Blue Ray,” etc., pp. 39, 40, 41, etc.).

[455] The most curious of all “curious coincidences,” to our mind is, that our men of science should put aside facts, striking enough to cause them to use such an expression when speaking of them, instead of setting to work to give us a philosophical explanation of the same.

[456] See Charles Elam, M.D.: “A Physician’s Problems,” London, 1869, p. 159.

[457] Jowett: “Timæus.”

[458] Ibid.

[459] According to General Pleasonton’s theory of positive and negative electricity underlying every psychological, physiological, and cosmic phenomena, the abuse of alcoholic stimulants transforms a man into a woman and vice versa, by changing their electricities. “When this change in the condition of his electricity has occurred,” says the author, “his attributes (those of a drunkard) become feminine; he is irritable, irrational, excitable ... becomes violent, and if he meets his wife, whose normal condition of electricity is like his present condition, positive, they repel each other, become mutually abusive, engage in conflict and deadly strife, and the newspapers of the next day announce the verdict of the coroner’s jury on the case.... Who would expect to find the discovery of the moving cause of all these terrible crimes in the perspiration of the criminal? and yet science has shown that the metamorphoses of a man into a woman, by changing the negative condition of his electricity into the positive electricity of the woman, with all its attributes, is disclosed by the character of his perspiration, superinduced by the use of alcoholic stimulants” (“The Influence of the Blue Ray,” p 119).

[460] Plato: “Timæus.”

[461] Littré: “Revue des Deux Mondes.”

[462] See des Mousseaux’s “Œuvres des Demons.”

[463] Du Potet: “Magie Devoilée,” pp. 51-147.

[464] Ibid., p. 201.

[465] Baron Du Potet: “Cours de Magnetisme,” pp. 17-108.

[466] “De Occulto Philosophiâ,” pp. 332-358.

[467] Cicero: “De Natura Deorum,” lib. i., cap. xviii.

[468] Eliphas Levi.

[469] “Timæus.” Such like expressions made Professor Jowett state in his Introduction that Plato taught the attraction of similar bodies to similar. But such an assertion would amount to denying the great philosopher even a rudimentary knowledge of the laws of magnetic poles.

[470] Alfred Marshall Mayer, Ph.D.: “The Earth a Great Magnet,” a lecture delivered before the Yale Scientific Club, Feb. 14, 1872.

[471] “Strange Story.”

[472] See Taylor’s “Pausanias;” MS. “Treatise on Dæmons,” by Psellus, and the “Treatise on the Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries.”

[473] Iamblichus: “De Vita Pythag.”

[474] “Anacalypsis,” vol. i., p. 807.

[475] Iamblichus: “Life of Pythagoras,” p. 297.

[476] Bulwer-Lytton: “Zanoni.”

[477] Cory: “Phædrus,” i. 328.

[478] This assertion is clearly corroborated by Plato himself, who says: “You say that, in my former discourse, I have not sufficiently explained to you the nature of the First, I purposely spoke enigmatically, that in case the tablet should have happened with any accident, either by land or sea, a person, without some previous knowledge of the subject, might not be able to understand its contents” (“Plato,” Ep. ii., p. 312; Cory: “Ancient Fragments”).

[479] “Josephus against Apion,” ii., p. 1079.

[480] See chapter ix., p.

[481] “Illusion; matter in its triple manifestation in the earthly, and the astral or fontal soul, or the body, and the Platonian dual soul, the rational and the irrational one,” see next chapter.

[482] “Perfection of Wisdom.”

[483] Porphyry gives the credit to Plotinus his master, of having been united with “God” six times during his life, and complains of having attained to it but twice, himself.

[484] Orpheus is said to have ascribed to the grand cycle 120,000 years of duration, and Cassandrus 136,000. See Censorinus: “de Natal. Die;” “Chronological and Astronomical Fragments.”

[485] W. and E. Denton; “The Soul of Things,” vol. i.

[486] See the “Cosmogony of Pherecydes.”

[487] See a few pages further on the quotation from the “Codex of the Nazarenes.”

[488] See Plato’s “Timæus.”

[489] On the authority of Irenæus, Justin Martyr, and the “Codex” itself, Dunlap shows that the Nazarenes treated their “spirit,” or rather soul, as a female and Evil Power. Irenæus, accusing the Gnostics of heresy, calls Christ and the Holy Ghost “the gnostic pair that produce the Æons” (Dunlap: “Sod, the Son of the Man,” p. 52, foot-note).

[490] Fetahil was with the Nazarenes the king of light, and the Creator; but in this instance he is the unlucky Prometheus, who fails to get hold of the Living Fire, necessary for the formation of the divine soul, as he is ignorant of the secret name (the ineffable or incommunicable name of the kabalists).

[491] The spirit of matter and concupiscence.

[492] See Franck’s “Codex Nazaræus” and Dunlap’s “Sod, the Son of the Man.”

[493] “Codex Nazaræus,” ii. 233.

[494] This Mano of the Nazarenes strangely resembles the Hindu Manu, the heavenly man of the “Rig-Vedas.”

[495] “I am the true vine and my Father is the husbandman” (John xv. 1).

[496] With the Gnostics, Christ, as well as Michael, who is identical in some respects with him, was the “Chief of the Æons.”

[497] “Codex Nazaræus,” i. 135.

[498] Ibid.

[499] “Codex Nazaræus,” iii. 61.

[500] The Astral Light, or anima mundi, is dual and bi-sexual. The male part of it is purely divine and spiritual; it is the Wisdom; while the female portion (the spiritus of the Nazarenes) is tainted, in one sense, with matter, and therefore is evil already. It is the life-principle of every living creature, and furnishes the astral soul, the fluidic perisprit to men, animals, fowls of the air, and everything living. Animals have only the germ of the highest immortal soul as a third principle. It will develop but through a series of countless evolutions; the doctrine of which evolution is contained in the kabalistic axiom: “A stone becomes a plant; a plant a beast; a beast a man; a man a spirit; and the spirit a god.”

[501] See Commentary on “Idra Suta,” by Rabbi Eleashar.

[502] Sod means a religious Mystery. Cicero mentions the sod, as constituting a portion of the Idean Mysteries. “The members of the Priest-Colleges were called Sodales,” says Dunlap, quoting Freund’s “Latin Lexicon,” iv. 448.

[503] The author of the “Sohar,” the great kabalistic work of the first century B.C.

[504] See Abbé Huc’s works.

[505] “The Sohar,” iii. 288; “Idra Suta.”

[506] Everard: “Mystères Physiologiques,” p. 132.

[507] See Plato’s “Timæus.”

[508] “Supernatural Religion; an Inquiry into the Reality of Divine Revelation,” vol. ii. London, 1875.

[509] See “Heavenly Arcana.”

[510] Burges: Preface.

[511] “Seventh Letter.”

[512] “The True Christian Religion.”

[513] E. A. Hitchcock: “Swedenborg, a Hermetic Philosopher.”

[514] “Ripley Revived,” 1678.

[515] “Mosaicall Philosophy,” p. 173. 1659.

[516] “Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces,” by J. Le Conte.

[517] “Archives des Sciences,” vol. xlv., p. 345. December, 1872.

[518] Aristotle: “De Generat. et Corrupt.,” lib. ii.

[519] “De Part.,” an. lib. i., c. 1.

[520] A Pythagorean oath. The Pythagoreans swore by their master.

[521] See Lemprière: “Classical Dictionary.”

[522] Psel. in Alieb: “Chaldean Oracles.”

[523] Proc. in 1 “Alieb.”

[524] From the Latin word mensa—table. This curious letter is copied in full in “La Science des Esprits,” by Eliphas Levi.

[525] The Sulanuth is described in chap. lxxx., vers. 19, 20, of “Jasher.”

[526] “And when the Egyptians hid themselves on account of the swarm” (one of the plagues alleged to have been brought on by Moses) “ ... they locked their doors after them, and God ordered the Sulanuth ...” (a sea-monster, naively explains the translator, in a foot-note) “which was then in the sea, to come up and go into Egypt ... and she had long arms, ten cubits in length ... and she went upon the roofs and uncovered the rafting and cut them ... and stretched forth her arm into the house and removed the lock and the bolt and opened the houses of Egypt ... and the swarm of animals destroyed the Egyptians, and it grieved them exceedingly.”

[527] “Strom,” vi., 17, § 159.

[528] Ibid., vi., 3, § 30.

[529] “Gorgias.”

[530] “Timæus.”

[531] Cory: “Phædro,” i. 69.

[532] Ibid., i. 123.

[533] Cory: “Phædras;” Cory’s “Plato,” 325.

[534] See “The Unseen Universe,” pp. 205, 206.

[535] See Bulwer-Lytton: “Strange Story,” p. 76. We do not know where in literature can be found a more vivid and beautiful description of this difference between the life-principle of man and that of animals, than in the passages herein briefly alluded to.

[536] A. R. Wallace: “The Action of Natural Selection on Man.”

[537] W. Denton: “The Soul of Things,” p. 273.

[538] “Herodotus,” b. i., c. 181.

[539] “Anthropology,” p. 125.

[540] “Of Sacrifices to Gods and Dæmons,” chap. ii.

[541] “Odyssey,” book vii.

[542] Porphyry: “Of Sacrifices to Gods and Dæmons,” chap. ii.

[543] Ibid.

[544] Iamblichus: “De Mysteriis Egyptorum.”

[545] Ibid.: “On the Difference between the Dæmons, the Souls, etc.”

[546] Du Potet: “La Magie Devoilée.”

[547] We wonder if Father Felix is prepared to include St. Augustine, Lactantius, and Bede in this category?

[548] For instance, Copernicus, Bruno, and Galileo? For further particulars see the “Index Expurgatorius.” Verily, wise are such popular sayings, as that, “Boldness carries off cities at one shout.”

[549] This statement, neither Herbert Spencer nor Huxley will be likely to traverse. But Father Felix seems insensible of his own debt to science; if he had said this in February, 1600, he might have shared the fate of poor Bruno.

[550] “Le Mystère et la Science,” conferences, P. Felix de Notre Dame; des Mousseaux: “Hauts Phen. Magie.”

[551] Damascius, in the “Theogony,” calls it Dis, “the disposer of all things.” Cory: “Ancient Fragments,” p. 314.

[552] Plato: “Timæus.”

[553] “Suidas: v. Tyrrhenia.”

[554] The reader will understand that by “years” is meant “ages,” not mere periods of twelve lunar months each.

[555] See the Greek translation by Philo Byblius.

[556] Cory: “Ancient Fragments.”

[557] We give the spelling and words of this Kabalist who lived and published his works in the seventeenth century. Generally he is considered as one of the most famous alchemists among the Hermetic philosophers.

[558] The most positive of materialistic philosophers agree that all that exists was evolved from ether; hence, air, water, earth, and fire, the four primordial elements must also proceed from ether and chaos the first Duad; all the imponderables, whether now known or unknown, proceed from the same source. Now, if there is a spiritual essence in matter, and that essence forces it to shape itself into millions of individual forms, why is it illogical to assert that each of these spiritual kingdoms in nature is peopled with beings evolved out of its own material? Chemistry teaches us that in man’s body there are air, water, earth, and heat, or fire—air is present in its components; water in the secretions; earth in the inorganic constituents; and fire in the animal heat. The Kabalist knows by experience that an elemental spirit contains only one, and that each one of the four kingdoms has its own peculiar elemental spirits; man being higher than they, the law of evolution finds its illustration in the combination of all four in him.

[559] Görres: “Mystique,” lib. iii., p. 63.

[560] The ancients called “the soul” the spirits of bad people; the soul was the larva and lemure. Good human spirits became gods.

[561] Porphyry: “De Sacrificiis.” Chapter on the true Cultus.

[562] “Mysteries of the Egyptians.”

[563] Second century, A.D. “Du Dieu de Socrate,” Apul. class., pp. 143-145.

[564] “Eastern Monachism,” p. 9.

[565] “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” iv. 385.

[566] Hardy: “Manual of Buddhism;” Dunlap: “The World’s Religions.”

[567] Lemprière (“Classical Dictionary,” art. “Pythagoras”) says that “there is great reason to suspect the truth of the whole narrative of Pythagoras’ journey into India,” and concludes by saying that this philosopher had never seen either Gymnosophists or their country. If this be so, how account for the doctrine of the metempsychosis of Pythagoras, which is far more that of the Hindu in its details than the Egyptian? But, above all, how account for the fact that the name Monas, applied by him to the First Cause, is the identical appellation given to that Being in the Sanscrit tongue? In 1792-7, when Lemprière’s “Dictionary” appeared, the Sanscrit was, we may say, utterly unknown; Dr. Haug’s translation of the “Aitareya Brahmana” (“Rig-Vedas”), in which this word occurs, was published only about twenty years ago, and until that valuable addition to the literature of archaic ages was completed, and the precise age of the “Aitareya” now fixed by Haug at 2000-2400 B.C.—was a mystery, it might be suggested, as in the case of Christian symbols, that the Hindus borrowed it from Pythagoras. But now, unless philology can show it to be a “coincidence,” and that the word Monas is not the same in its minutest definitions, we have a right to assert that Pythagoras was in India, and that it was the Gymnosophists who instructed him in his metaphysical theology. The fact alone that “Sanscrit, as compared with Greek and Latin, is an elder sister,” as Max Müller shows, is not sufficient to account for the perfect identity of the Sanscrit and Greek words Monas, in their most metaphysical, abstruse sense. The Sanscrit word Deva (god) has become the Latin deus, and points to a common source; but we see in the Zoroastrian “Zend-Avesta” the same word, meaning diametrically the opposite, and becoming daêva, or evil spirit, from which comes the word devil.

[568] Haug: “Aitareya Brahmanam.”

[569] Ibid.

[570] Berosus: fragment preserved by Alex. Polyhostor; Cory: “Of the Cosmogony and the Deluge.”

[571] Some writer has employed a most felicitous expression in describing the majesty of the Hindu archaic monuments, and the exquisite finish of their sculpture. “They built,” says he, “like giants, and finished like jewelers.”

[572] “Anatomie Cerebrale,” Malacorne, Milan.

[573] Psellus, 6, Plet. 2; Cory: “Chaldean Oracles.”

[574] See “Lecture on the Vedas.”