Category: Isis Unveiled: H. P. Blavatsky (1877)

"This is precisely the substratum of the Pagan thought, which, among other meanings, emblematized by the rites of the resurrection of Osiris, Adonis, Bacchus, and other slaughtered sun-gods, the resurrection of all nature in spring, the germination of seeds that have been dead and sleeping during winter, and so were allegorically said to be kept [...]

""As a rule, the Brahmans", says Jacolliot, "rarely go beyond the class of grihesta, (priests of the vulgar castes), and purahita, (exorcisers, divines, prophets, and evocators of spirits). And yet, we shall see...once that we have touched the question and study of manifestations and phenomena, that these initiates of the first degree, (the lowest), attribute [...]

"The Christians were the first to make the existence of Satan a dogma of the Church. And once that she had established it, she had to struggle for over 1,700 years for the repression of a mysterious force, which it was her policy to make appear of diabolical origin. Unfortunately, in manifesting itself, this force [...]

"And now we will bid farewell to thaumatophobia and its advocates and consider thaumatomania under its multifarious aspects. In volume II., we intend to review the "miracles" of Paganism and weigh the evidence in their favor in the same scales with Christian theology. There is a conflict not merely impending but already begun between science [...]

"The Champollions were the first in Europe to take the student of archeology by the hand, and, leading him on into the silent crypts of the past, prove that civilization did not begin with our generations; for "though the origins of ancient Egypt are unknown, she is found to have been at the most distant [...]

"After having devoted their whole lives to the study of the records of the old Egyptian wisdom, both Champollion-Figeac and Champollion, Junior, publicly declared, notwithstanding many biased judgments hazarded by certain hasty and unwise critics, that the Books of Hermes "truly contain a mass of Egyptian traditions which are constantly corroborated by the most authentic [...]

""Truth alone", says Pimander, "is eternal and immutable; truth is the first of blessings; but truth is not and cannot be on earth; it is possible that God sometimes gifts a few men together with the faculty of comprehending divine things with that of rightly understanding truth; but nothing is true on earth, for everything [...]

"Recapitulating the evidence contained in this work, if we begin with the archaic and unknown ages of the Hermetic Pimander, and come down to 1876, we find that one universal belief in magic has run through all these centuries. We have presented the ideas of Trismegistus in his dialogue with Asclepius; and without mentioning the [...]

"And thus it is that at one stroke the world loses its rotation, and the universe is bereaved of its guardians and protectors, the centrifugal and centripetal forces! Nay, ether itself, blown out of space, is but a "fallacy", a myth born of a bad habit of using empty words; the sun is a pretender [...]

"In days of old - in 1876 - the world believed in centrifugal force, and the Newtonian theory, which explained the flattening of the poles by the rotary motion of the earth around its axis, was orthodox. Upon this hypothesis, the greater portion of the globular mass was believed to gravitate toward the equator; and [...]