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

"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 [...]

"When, centuries before our era, the Hindu Bramaheupto affirmed that the starry sphere was immovable, and that the daily rising and setting of stars confirms the motion of the earth upon its axis; and when Aristarchus of Samos, born 267 years B.C., and the Pythagorean philosopher Nicete, the Syracusan, Maintained the same, what was the [...]

"Here we are with transit of science half accomplished, and all our ideas in process of readjustment to the theories of force-correlation, natural selection, atomic polarity, and evolution. And here, to mock our conceit, our apprehensions, and our despair, we may read what Manu said, perhaps 10,000 years, before the birth of Christ: "The first [...]

""Medicine: Their knowledge was truly astonishing. In Tcharaka and Sousruta, the two princes of Hindu medicine, is laid down the system which Hippocrates appropriated later. Sousruta notably enunciates the principles of preventive medicine or hygiene, which he places much above curative medicine - too often, according to him, empyrical. Are we more advanced today? It [...]

"Although it would seem as if we had already furnished sufficient proofs that modern science has little or no reason to boast of originality, yet before closing this volume we will adduce a few more to place the matter beyond doubt. We have but to recapitulate, as briefly as possible, the several claims to new [...]

"Assuredly, the flesh of man, beast, and bird should be as easily endowed with magnetic life-principle as the inert table of a modern medium. Either both wonders are possible and true, or both must fall to the ground, together with the miracles of Apostolic days, and those of the more modern Popish Church. As for [...]