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

"As we have said, but few kabalists believe in it, and this doctrine originated with certain astrologers. While casting up the nativities of certain historical personages renowned for some peculiarities of disposition, they found the conjunction of the planets answering perfectly to remarkable oracles and prophesies about other persons born ages later. Observation, and what [...]

""Shut the door in the face of the daemon", says the Kabala, "and he will keep running away from you, as if you pursued him", which means, that you must not give a hold on you to such spirits of obsession by attracting them into an atmosphere of congenial sin. These daemons seek to introduce [...]

"Thus, it is but the sixth appellation, that of a consulter with familiar spirits or a witch, that had to incur the greatest penalty of the law of Moses, for it is only a witch which must not be suffered to live, while all the others are simply enumerated as such with whom the people [...]

"Another Russian appellation for witch and wizard, the former being purely Slavonian, is znahar and znaharka (feminine) from the same verb znat to know. Thus Dr. More's definition of the word, given in 1678, is perfectly correct, and coincides in every particular with modern philology. "Use", says this scholar, "questionless had appropriated the word to [...]

"It appears that about the year 1678, a certain divine, named John Webster, wrote Criticisms and Interpretations of Scripture, against the existence of witches, and other "superstitions". Finding the work "a weak and impertinent piece", Dr. More criticized it in a latter to Glanvil, the author of Sadducismus Triumphatus, and as an appendix sent a [...]

"Further, the same occult doctrine recognizes another possibility; albeit so rare and so vague that it is really useless to mention it. Even the modern Occidental occultists deny it, though it is universally accepted in Eastern countries. When, through vice, fearful crimes and animal passions, a disembodied spirit has fallen to the eighth sphere - [...]

"As in the case exemplified by Professor Le Conte (vide chap. ix.), "there is no force in nature" - and the rule applies to the spiritual as well as to the physical evolution - "which is capable of raising at once spirit or matter from No. 1 to No. 3, or from 2 to 4, [...]

"We will now present a few fragments of this mysterious doctrine of reincarnation - as distinct from metempsychosis - which we have from an authority. Reincarnation, i.e., the appearances of the same individual, or rather of his astral monad, twice on the same planet, is not a rule in nature; it is an exception, like [...]

""The ruins of the ancient city of Aurungabad are not very far from these caves. It was a walled city of great repute, but is now deserted. There are not only broken walls, but crumbling palaces. They were built of immense strength, and some of the walls appear as solid as the everlasting hills. There [...]

"Even remains of architectural relics of the earliest races have been sadly neglected by antiquarians, until now. The caverns of Ajunta, which are but 200 miles from Bombay, in the Chandor range, and the ruins of the ancient city of Aurungabad, whose crumbling palaces and curious tombs have lain in desolate solitude for many centuries, [...]