Madame Blavatsky on Greek Philosophy

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Hellenic and Hellenistic Papers Series · 16 pages

Pages from Isis Unveiled, Vol. II, pages 279–88, reproduced with the original page numbers marked in the text and the footnote citations retained.

The passage argues that a single doctrine underlies the Greek schools and the older Chaldean colleges alike. Plato, Anaxagoras, Pythagoras and the Eleatics are said all to have taught the doctrine of dual evolution, with the transmigration of souls referring to the progress of man from world to world after death here, and every philosophy worthy of the name to have taught that the spirit of man, if not the soul, was pre-existent. Three witnesses are then set side by side: Josephus, that the Essenes believed souls immortal and descending from the ethereal spaces to be chained to bodies; Philo Judæus, that the air is full of them, those nearest the earth descending to be tied to mortal bodies and returning again to others, desirous to live in them; and the Zohar, where the soul pleads her freedom before God, saying she is happy in this world and does not wish to go into another where she will be a handmaid exposed to all kinds of pollution — to which the answer given is the doctrine of fatal necessity, that against thy will thou becomest an embryo and against thy will thou art born. From this Blavatsky draws the general principle that the argument rests on: that light would be incomprehensible without darkness to show it by contrast, good no good without evil, and personal virtue no merit unless it had passed through the furnace of temptation; that nothing is eternal and unchangeable save the Concealed Deity; and that nothing finite can remain stationary but must either progress or recede.

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