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

"Later, in the Pythagorean speculations, Zeus became the metaphysical trinity; the monad evolving from its invisible SELF the active cause, effect, and intelligent will, the whole forming the Tetractis. Still later we find the earlier Neoplatonists leaving the primal monad aside, on the ground of its utter incomprehensibleness to human intellect, speculating merely on the [...]

"The radical element of the oldest religions was essentially sabaistic; and we maintain that their myths and allegories - if once correctly and thoroughly interpreted, will dovetail with the most exact astronomical notions of our day. We will say more; there is hardly a scientific law - whether pertaining to physical astronomy or physical geography [...]

"We have brought sufficient testimony in the preceding chapter to show that the ancients must have used as good optical instruments as we have now. Were the instruments in possession of Nebuchadnezzar of such moderate power, and the knowledge of his astronomers so very contemptible, when, according to Rawlinson's reading of the tiles, the Birs-Nimrud, [...]

"In just twice two hundred years from the date of that prophecy, we had the Crimean war, during which the alliance of the Gallic Cock and English Bull interfered with the political designs of the Russian Bear. In 1856 the war was ended, and Turkey, or the Crescent, closely escaped destruction. In the present year [...]

"A witty joke may sound very prettily, even in a learned treatise, and the word "coincidence" may be applied to anything we are unwilling to accept. But a sophism is not a truism; still less is it a mathematical demonstration, which alone ought to serve as a beacon - to astronomers, at least. Astrology is [...]

"So much for the first of Mr. Proctor's two propositions; now for the second. The work which we have been noticing, comprises a series of twelve essays, of which the last is entitled Thoughts on Astrology. The author treats the subject with so much more consideration than is the custom of men of his class, [...]

"Light - the first mentioned in Genesis, is termed by the kabalists, Sephira, or the Divine Intelligence, the mother of all the Sephiroth, while the Concealed Wisdom is the father. Light is the first begotten, and the first emanation of the Supreme, and Light is Life, says the evangelist. Both are electricity - the life [...]

"The inherent restlessness of matter is embodied in the saying of Hermes: "Action is the life of Phta"; and Orpheus calls nature πολυμεχανος μετερ, "the mother that makes many things", or the ingenious, the contriving, the inventive mother. Mr. Proctor says: "All that is upon and within the earth, all vegetable forms and all animal [...]

"Before any of our modern teachers thought of evolution, the ancients taught us, through Hermes, that nothing can be abrupt in nature; that she never proceeds by jumps and starts, that everything in her works is slow harmony, and that there is nothing sudden - not even violent death. The slow development from preexisting forms [...]

"Ages before our savants of the nineteenth century came into existence, a wise man of the Orient thus expressed himself, in addressing the invisible Deity: "For thy Almighty Hand, that made the world of formless matter." There is much more contained in this language than we are willing to explain, but we will say that [...]