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

"The books of Thoth, or (Hermes Trismegistus), which contain within their sacred pages the spiritual and physical history of the creation and progress of our world, were left to mould in oblivion and contempt for ages. They found no interpreters in Christian Europe; the Philaletheians, or wise "lovers of the truth", were no more; they [...]

"The gods exist", says Epicurus, "but they are not what the rabble, suppose them to be." And yet Epicurus, judged as usual by superficial critics, is set down and paraded as a materialist. But neither the Great First Cause nor its emanation - human, immortal spirit - have left themselves "without a witness." Mesmerism and [...]

"The Old Testament was compiled and arranged from oral tradition; the masses never knew its real meaning, for Moses was ordered to impart the "hidden truths" but to his seventy elders on whom the "Lord" put of the spirit which was upon the legislator. Maimonides, whose authority and whose knowledge of the sacred history can [...]

"To accept the Bible as a "revelation" and nail belief to a literal translation, is worse than absurdity - it is a blasphemy against the Divine majesty of the "Unseen". If we had to judge of the Deity, and the world of spirits, by its human interpreters, now that philology proceeds with giant-strides on the [...]

"Prayer opens the spiritual sight of man, for prayer is desire, and desire develops WILL; the magnetic emanations proceeding from the body at every effort - whether mental or physical - produce self-magnetization and ecstasy. Plotinus recommended solitude for prayer, as the most efficient means of obtaining what is asked; and Plato advised those who [...]

"Nothing is more demonstrable than the proposition that the perfection of matter is reached at the expense of instinct. The zoophyte attached to the submarine rock, opening its mouth to attract the food that floats by, shows, proportionately with its physical structure, more instinct than the whale. The ant, with its wonderful architectural, social, and [...]

"But we will now turn from our digression to further consider the question of reason and instinct. The latter, according to the ancients, proceeded from the divine, the former from purely human. One (the instinct) is the product of the senses, a sagaciousness shared by the lowest animals, even those who have no reason - [...]

"We have shown elsewhere that the "secret doctrine" does not concede immortality to all men alike. "They would never see the sun, if it were not of the nature of the sun", said Plotinus. Only "through the highest purity and chastity we shall approach nearer to God, and receive in the contemplation of Him, the [...]

"Now, for one who knows Professor Draper, even by reputation, the latter supposition is simply absurd. Therefore, we must think, with deep regret, that his desire was to misrepresent their religious aspirations. It is decidedly an awkward thing for modern philosophers, whose sole aim seems to be the elimination of the ideas of God and [...]

"If the doctrines of Aristotle have exercised on the later Neo-platonists such a "dominating influence", how is it that neither Plotinus, nor Porphyry, nor Proclus ever accepted his theories on dreams and prophetic soul-visions? While Aristotle held that most of those who prophesy have "diseases of madness" - thus furnishing some American plagiarists and specialists [...]