Bereft of Spiritual Light, Man Is but a Soulless Being

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 54 pages

Fifty-four pages from Isis Unveiled, volume I, chapter II, pages 39 to 72, with the usual abstract of central ideas at the front. The frontispiece is credited to Zdzisław Beksiński, which is an unusual choice for this series and sets the tone of the file rather well.

Its first half is a sustained critique of two parties at once, and it is harder on the investigators of phenomena than on the phenomena. The charge against the spiritualists is that they chase effects without studying causes: the phrase used is that the phenomena chase the scientists and the scientists run away from the phenomena, and that a man who tries to find a river's source by exploring its mouth is on the same errand. William Crookes's eight theories for paranormal phenomena are set out. The charge against the learned is that reason and opinion are both subject to error, that the views of the most learned philosophers are likelier to be proved wrong than plain common sense, and — in one of the sharper lines here — that the light of truth will often penetrate an empty head more easily than a brain crammed with encyclopaedic learning and quotations. The Jupiters of science who thrust their learning on credulous mortals are dealt with in the same spirit, with the observation that it is not the gods who shout loudest. Between these runs a steadier thread about what man is for: private life without ideals or moral principles is a useless life, and the proper work is neither to animalize nor to spiritualize but to humanize oneself. Alchemical matter follows — malleable glass, the Alkahest, and the twenty years Eugenius Philalethes is said to have spent learning the eagles of the alchemists. The second half turns metaphysical and is the part worth the reading: Plato's Primal Being as the Orphic Egg, an emanation of the Demiurgic Mind holding the idea of the world to be created within itself; Eros-Phanes evolving from the spiritual egg; the aethereal wind brooding over Chaos; and the formulation the file builds toward — that Cosmos is the offspring of Divine Thought, Father in heaven and Mother on earth, and that imagination is to be validated by faith and will, then faith confirmed by reason and experience.

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