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

"Let us see in what degree Comte's boasted religion of the future is superior to Spiritualism, and how much less likely its advocates are to need the refuge of those lunatic asylums which they officiously recommend for the mediums whom they have been so solicitous about.   Before beginning, let us call attention to the [...]

"Covering themselves with the mask of a pretended erudition, the Positivists of this country have organized themselves into clubs and committees with the design of uprooting Spiritualism, while pretending to impartially investigate it.   Too timid to openly challenge the churches and the Christian doctrine, they endeavor to sap that upon which all religion is [...]

"The philosopher-mathematician - the high priest of the "religion of the future" - taught his doctrine as do all his brother-prophets of our modern days. He deified "woman", and furnished her with an altar; but the goddess had to pay for its use.   The rationalists had laughed at the mental aberration of Fourier; they [...]

"Some thirty or forty years ago, in France, Auguste Comte - a pupil of the Ecole Polytechnique, who had remained for years at the establishment as a repetiteur of Transcendent Analysis and Rationalistic Mechanics - awoke one fine morning with the very irrational idea of becoming a prophet.   In America, prophets can be met [...]

"The most inveterate, uncompromising enemies of Spiritualism are a class very fortunately composed of but few members, who, nevertheless, declaim the louder and assert their views with a clamorousness worthy of a better cause.   These are the pretenders to science of young America - a mongrel class of pseudo-philosophers, mentioned at the opening of [...]

"The development of psychological science has been retarded far more by the ridicule of this class of pretenders, than by the inherent difficulties of its study.   The empty laugh of the scientific nursling or of the fools of fashion, has done more to keep man ignorant of his imperial psychical powers, than the obscurities, [...]

"We assert again, in full confidence, that there does not exist a professional wizard, either of the North, South or West, who can compete with anything approaching success, with these untutored, naked sons of the East.   These require no Egyptian Hall for their performances, nor any preparations or rehearsals; but are ever ready, at [...]

"The fact alone, that a now notorious London juggler refused to accept a challenge for £1,000 offered him by Mr. Algernon Joy, to produce such manifestations as are usually obtained through mediums, unless he was left unbound and free from the hands of a committee, negatives his expose of the occult phenomena.   Clever as [...]

"The mirror of the soul cannot reflect both earth and heaven; and the one vanishes from its surface, as the other is glassed upon its deep." ZANONI.   "Qui, donc, t'a donne la mission d'annoncer au peuple que la Divinite n'existe pas - quel avantage trouves tu a persuader a l'homme qu'une force aveugle preside [...]

"Christopher Columbus discovered America, and Americus Vespucius reaped the glory and usurped his dues. Theophrastus Paracelsus rediscovered the occult properties of the magnet - "the bone of Horus" which, twelve centuries before his time, had played such an important part in the theurgic mysteries - and he very naturally became the founder of the school [...]