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

"An Eastern artist has attempted to give pictorial expression to the kabalistic doctrine of the cycles. The picture covers a whole inner wall of a subterranean temple in the neighborhood of a great Buddhistic pagoda, and strikingly suggestive. Let us attempt to convey some idea of the design, as we recall it. Imagine a given [...]

"The speculations of Dupuis, Volney, and Godfrey Higgins on the secret meaning of the cycles, or the kalpas and the yugs of the Brahmans and Buddhists, amounted to little, as they did not have the key to the esoteric, spiritual doctrine therein contained. No philosophy ever speculated on God as an abstraction, but considered Him [...]

"Like the revolutions of a wheel, there is a regular succession of death and birth, the moral cause of which is the cleaving to existing objects, while the instrumental cause is karma (the power which controls the universe, prompting it to activity), merit and demerit. "It is, therefore, the great desire of all beings who [...]

"This philosophy teaches that nature never leaves her work unfinished; if baffled at the first attempt, she tries again. When she evolves a human embryo, the intention is that a man shall be perfected - physically, intellectually, and spiritually. His body is to grow mature, wear out, and die; his mind unfold, ripen, and be [...]

""The gods and the angels", says Iamblichus,"appear to us among peace and harmony; the bad demons, in tossing everything in confusion....As to the ordinary souls, we can perceive them more rarely, etc." "The human soul (the astral body) is a demon that our language may name genius", says Apuleius. "She is an immortal god, though [...]

"Gorres, describing a conversation he had with some Hindus of the Malabar coast, reports that upon asking them whether they had ghosts among them, they replied, "Yes, but we know them to be bad spirits...good ones can hardly ever appear at all. They are principally the spirits of suicides and murderers, or of those who [...]

"Every organized thing in this world, visible as well as invisible, has an element appropriate to itself. The fish lives and breathes in the water; the plant consumes carbonic acid, which for animals and men produces death; some beings are fitted for rarefied strata of air, others exist only in the densest. Life, to some, [...]

"The ancients, who named but four elements, made of aether a fifth one. On account of its essence being made divine by the unseen presence it was considered as a medium between this world and the next. They held that when the directing intelligences retired from any portion of ether, one of the four kingdoms [...]

"If we now compare this doctrine with the speculations of science, which comes to a full stop at the Borderland of the unknown, and, while incompetent to solve the mystery, will allow no one else to speculate upon the subject; or, with the great theological dogma, that the world was called into existence by a [...]

"Modern science is in a dilemma; it must concede our hypothesis to be correct, or admit the possibility of miracle. To do so, is to say that there can be an infraction of natural law. If this can happen in one case, what assurance have we that it may not be repeated indefinitely, and so [...]