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

"Every sentence of Pythagoras, like most of the ancient maxims, has a dual signification; and, while it had an occult physical meaning, expressed literally in its words, it embodied a moral precept, which is explained by Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras. This "Dig not fire with a sword", is the ninth symbol in the [...]

"Formerly, magic was a universal science, entirely in the hands of the sacerdotal savant. Though the focus was jealously guarded in the sanctuaries, its rays illuminated the whole of mankind. Otherwise, how are we to account for the extraordinary identity of "superstitions", customs, traditions, and even sentences, repeated in popular proverbs so widely scattered from [...]

"We are at the bottom of a cycle and evidently is a transitory state. Plato divides the intellectual progress of the universe during every cycle into fertile and barren period. In the sublunary regions, the spheres of the various elements remain eternally in perfect harmony with the divine nature, he says; "but their parts", owing [...]

"It is sufficient for one to express belief in the existence of a mysterious sympathy between the life of certain plants and that of human beings, to assure being made the subject of ridicule. Nevertheless, there are many well-authenticated cases going to show the reality of such an affinity. Persons have been known to fall [...]

"Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten has collected a great number of authenticated facts from secular and scientific journals, which show with what serious questions our scientists sometimes replace the vexed subject of "Ghosts and Goblins." She quotes from a Washington paper a report of one of these solemn conclaves, held on the evening of April 29th, [...]

"In his notes on Ghosts and Goblins, when reviewing some facts adduced by certain illustrious defenders of the spiritual phenomena, such as Professor de Morgan, Mr. Robert Dale Owen, and Mr. Wallace, among others - Mr. Richard A. Proctor says that he "cannot see any force in the following remarks by Professor Wallace: 'How is [...]

"Evidently Proclus does not advocate here simply a superstition, but science; for notwithstanding that it is occult, and unknown to our scholars, who deny its possibilities, magic is still a science. It is firmly and solely based on the mysterious affinities between organic and inorganic bodies, the visible productions of the four kingdoms, and the [...]

"In the manuscript commentary of Proclus on magic he gives the following account: "In the same manner as lovers gradually advance from that beauty which is apparent in sensible forms, to that which is divine; so the ancient priests, when they considered that there is a certain alliance and sympathy in natural things to each [...]

"Science tells us that heat may be shown to develop electricity, electricity produce heat; and magnetism to evolve electricity, and vice versa. Motion, they tell us, results from motion itself, and so on, ad infinitum. This is the A B C of occultism and of the earliest alchemists. The indestructibility of matter and force being [...]

"The theory of "force-correlation", though it may be in the minds of our contemporaries "the greatest discovery of the age", can account for neither the beginning nor the end of one of such forces; neither can the theory point out the cause of it. Forces may be convertible, and one may produce the other, still, [...]