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

"Eliphas Levi, the modern magician, describes the astral light in the following sentence: "We have said that to acquire magical power, two things are necessary: to disengage the will from all servitude, and to exercise it in control."   "The sovereign will is represented in our symbols by the woman who crushes the serpent's head, [...]

"Professor Josiah P. Cooke, of Harvard University, says that he "cannot agree...with those who regard the wave-theory of light as an established principle of science."   Herschel's doctrine, that the intensity of light, in effect of each undulation, "is inversely as the square of the distance from the luminous body", if correct, damages a good [...]

"Admitting, then, that this mythical agent is Ether, we will proceed to see what and how much of it is known to science. With respect to the various effects of the different solar rays, Robert Hunt, F.R.S., remarks, in his Researches on Light in its Chemical Relations, that:   "Those rays which give the most [...]

"It is not only from the Mosaic books that we mean to adduce proof for our further arguments. The ancient Jews got all their knowledge - religious as well as profane - from the nations with which we see them mixed up from the earliest periods.   Even the oldest of all sciences, their kabalistic [...]

"In the days of Democritus and Aristotle, the cycle has already begun to enter on its downward path of progress. And if these two philosophers could discuss so well the atomic theory and trace the atom to its material or physical point, their ancestors may have gone further still and followed its genesis far beyond [...]

"One fact at least is proved: there is not a cosmogonical fragment, to whatever nation it may belong, but proves by this universal allegory of water and the spirit brooding over it, that no more than our modern physicists did any of them hold the universe to have sprung into existence out of nothing;   [...]

"It is an easy task to show that the cosmogonical legends all over the world are based on a knowledge by the ancients of those sciences which have allied themselves in our days to support the doctrine of evolution; and that further research may demonstrate that they were far better acquainted with the fact of [...]

"What is the primordial Chaos Aether? The modern Ether; not such as is recognized by our scientists, but such as it was known to the ancient philosophers, long before the time of Moses; Ether, with all its mysterious and occult properties, containing in itself the germs of universal creation; Ether, the celestial virgin, the spiritual [...]

"In the Chaldean legend of Berosus, Oannes or Dagon, the man-fish, instructing the people, shows the infant world created out of water and all beings originating from this prima materia.   Moses teaches that only earth and water can bring a living soul; and we read in the Scriptures that herbs could not grow until [...]

"Now, what is this mystic, primordial substance? In the book of Genesis, at the beginning of the first chapter, it is termed the "face of the waters", said to have been incubated by the "Spirit of God". Job mentions, in chap. xxvi., 5, that "dead things are formed from under the waters, and inhabitants thereof." [...]