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

"Magic was considered a divine science which led to a participation in the attributes of Divinity itself. "It unveils the operations of nature", says Philo Judeaus, "and leads to the contemplation of celestial powers." In later periods its abuse and degeneration into sorcery made it an object of general abhorrence.   We must therefore deal [...]

"Thither gathered the students of all countries before Alexandria was founded. "How comes it", Ennemoser goes on to say, "that so little has become known of these mysteries? through so many ages and amongst so many different times and people?   The answer is that it is owing to the universally strict silence of the [...]

"Dupuis, also, after devoting many years of study to the problem, mistook the symbolic circle, and attributed their religion solely to astronomy. Eberhart (Berliner Monatschrift) and many other German writers of the last and present centuries, dispose of magic most unceremoniously, and think it due to the Platonic mythos of the Timaeus.   But how, [...]

"Despite their apparent Polytheism, the ancients - those of the educated class at all events - were entirely monotheistical; and this, too, ages upon ages before the days of Moses.   In the Ebers Papyrus this fact is shown conclusively in the following words, translated from the first four lines of Plate I:    "I came [...]

"Bart goes deeper than Schweigger into the significations of the old myths, and studies the subject from both its spiritual and physical aspects. He treats at length of the Phrygian Dactyls, those "magicians and exorcists of sickness", and the Cabeirian Theurgists.   He says: "While we treat of the close union of the Dactyls and [...]

"Schweigger proves that symbols of all the mythologies have a scientific foundation and substance. It is only through recent discoveries of the physical electro-magnetical powers of nature that such experts in Mesmerism as Ennemoser, Schweigger and Bart, in Germany, Baron Du Potet and Regazzoni, in France and Italy, were enabled to trace with almost faultless [...]

""Firstly", says Mr. Felt, "the fundamental diagram to which all science of elementary geometry, both plain and solid, is referable; to produce arithmetical systems of proportion in a geometrical manner; to identify this figure with all the remains of architecture and sculpture, in all which it had been followed in a marvelously exact manner; to [...]

"No subsequent people has been so proficient in geometry as the builders of the Pyramids and the other Titanic monuments, antediluvian and postdiluvian.  On the other hand, none has ever equaled them in practical interrogation of nature.   An undeniable proof of this is the significance of their countless symbols. Every one of these symbols [...]

"As Prof. Draper truly remarks:   "Long-continued and close observations were necessary before some of these astronomical results that have reached our times could have been ascertained.   Thus, Babylonians had fixed the length of a tropical year within twenty-five seconds of the truth; their estimate of the sidereal year was barely two minutes in excess. [...]

"In the Abbott Egyptological collection, in New York City, may be seen numerous evidences of the skill of the ancients in various handicrafts; among others the art of lace-making; and, as it could hardly be expected but that the signs of woman's vanity should go side by side which those of man's strength, there are [...]