“For the objector to affirm that the Brahman-adepts and the fakirs admit that of themselves they are powerless and can only act with the help of disembodied human spirits, is to state that these Hindus are unacquainted with the laws of their sacred books and even the meaning of the word Pitris.
The Laws of Manu, the Atharva-Veda, and other books, prove what we now say. “All that exists”, says the Atharva-Veda, “is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence the gods are in the power of the Brahmans.”
This is logical, albeit seemingly paradoxical, and it is the fact. And this fact will explain to those who have not hitherto had the clew, (among whom Jacolliot must be numbered, as will appear on reading his works), why the fakir should be confined to the first, or lowest degree of that course of initiation whose highest adepts, or hierophants, are the sannyasi, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called “human spirits” in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
“Then they, (the gods), created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, the Gandarbas, and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, and the Pitris – lunar ancestors of the human race. (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed “progenitors of mankind”).
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the “miracles” were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him “who knows”.
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 