Empedocles of Agrigentum, Pagan Thaumaturgist

Empedocles (Fragments), H.P. Blavatsky · Buddhas and Initiates Series · 32 pages

A two-part file on the Sicilian philosopher of the fifth century BC. The first and larger part is the extant fragments of Empedocles in the translation of Arthur Fairbanks, with the translator's introduction, the fragments arranged as Books I, II and III, the separate fragments On Purifications, and then the ancient testimony about him assembled from three sources: the passages in Plato that relate to Empedocles, the passages in Aristotle that refer to him, and the material in Diels' Doxographi Graeci.

The second part is Blavatsky's sketch of his teaching. She holds that Empedocles was taught by the hierophants of Egypt and that his doctrine of a dual soul in men and animals is the same division made by Pythagoras and Plato; that his two souls followed from a dual magnetic force of attraction and repulsion running through the universe, a view she says Kepler confirmed; and that his Monad, the breath of Darkness moving over the slumbering Waters of life, is primordial matter with spirit latent in it. His reputation as a thaumaturgist — recalling the dead and ruling the wind — closes the account, together with the low opinion later Christian writers took of him.

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