Hermetic Fire, Spirit of the Flame

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 7 pages

Seven pages drawn from Isis Unveiled, volume I pages 422-24 and following, arranged under running headings and footnoted with biographical notes on the scientists quoted.

The starting point is Professor Balfour Stewart's tribute to Heracleitos, the Ephesian who declared that fire was the great cause and that all things were in perpetual flux — a conception the professor calls allied to, though less precise than, the modern view of matter as essentially dynamical. The reply is that he finds the word fire vague because nobody has shown what the ancients meant by it. The answer given is the heart of the file: fire was regarded as a triple principle, just as water is a visible fluid with invisible gases within it and spiritual principles behind them. The three are set out as visible flame; invisible or astral fire, which is inert until active and then produces heat, light, chemical force and electricity; and spirit. The same threefold rule was applied to each element, so that everything evolved from their combinations, man included, was held to be triune. For the Rosicrucians, described as successors of the theurgists, fire was the source not only of the material atoms but of the forces that energise them. From this comes the image the file is named for: when a visible flame goes out it has vanished from the materialist's conception for ever, whereas the Hermetic philosopher follows it across the partition-world of the knowable and out on the other side into the unknowable — just as he follows the disembodied human spirit, a vital spark of heavenly flame, beyond the grave. The remaining pages press the criticism of physical science, quoting Balfour Stewart's own warning against rushing from Scylla into Charybdis by working physical conceptions to excess, and his admission that the universe has more than one point of view and may hold regions that will not yield their treasures to physicists armed only with kilogrammes and metres.

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