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

"As by gradual progression from the star-cloudlet to the development of the physical body of man, the rule holds good, so from the universal ether to the incarnate human spirit, they traced one uninterrupted series of entities. These evolutions were from the world of spirit into the world of gross matter; and through that back [...]

"According to the ancients doctrines, the soulless elemental spirits were evolved by the ceaselessly motion inherent in the astral light. Light is force, and the latter is produced by the will. As this will proceeds from an intelligence which cannot err, for it has nothing of the material organs of human thought in it, being [...]

"One of the very few commentators on old Greek and Latin authors, who have given their just dues to the ancients for their mental development, is Thomas Taylor. In his translation of Iamblichus' Life of Pythagoras, we find him remarking as follows: "Since Pythagoras, as Iamblichus informs us, was initiated in all the Mysteries of [...]

"Why, then, accuse the ancient biographers of such men as Pythagoras and Appolonius of Tyana of either willful misrepresentation or absurd superstition? When we realize that the majority of those who are so skeptical as to the magical powers possessed by the ancient philosophers, who laugh at the old theogonies and the fallacies of mythology, [...]

"Scholastic skeptics, as well as ignorant materialists, have greatly amused themselves for the last two centuries over the absurdities attributed to Pythagoras by his biographer, Iamblichus. The Samian philosopher is said to have persuaded a she-bear to give up eating human flesh; to have forced a white eagle to descend to him from the clouds, [...]

"Magic", says Psellus, "formed the last part of the sacerdotal science. It investigated the nature, power, and quality of everything sublunary; of the elements and their parts, of animals, all various plants and their fruits, of stones and herbs. In short, it explored the essence and power of everything. From hence, therefore, it produced its [...]

"The prodigies accomplished by the priests of theurgical magic are so well authenticated, and the evidence - if human testimony is worth anything at all - is so overwhelming, that, rather than confess that the Pagan theurgists far out-rivaled the Christians in miracles, Sir David Brewster piously concedes to the former the greatest proficiency in [...]

"The same may be said respecting the Newtonian law of gravitation. Following strictly the Pythagorean doctrine, Plato held that gravitation was not merely a law of the magnetic attraction of lesser bodies to larger ones, but a magnetic repulsion of similars and attraction of dissimilars. "Things brought together", says he, "contrary to nature, are naturally [...]

"Theurgical magic is the last expression of occult psychological science. The Academicians reject it as the hallucination of diseased brains, or brand it with the opprobrium of charlatanry. We deny to them most emphatically the right of expressing their opinion on a subject which they have never investigated. They have no more right, in their [...]

"If unwilling to seek for proof or receive information from mediaeval, hermetic philosophy, we may go still further back into antiquity, and select, out of the great body of philosophers of the pre-Christian ages, one who can least be accused of superstition and credulity - Cicero. Speaking of those whom he calls gods, and who [...]