Fohat, the Life of the Universe and Spirit of Its Forces

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's First Proposition Series · 17 pages

Seventeen pages with an abstract and train of thoughts at the front, giving each claim with its page number.

The proposition is that Fohat is the life of the universe and the spirit of the intelligent forces in nature — and that those forces, which give nature her laws and enact them, are what occultism means by the gods. Before arguing it, the study spends several pages on the state of the argument itself, and is even-handed about who is at fault: inconsistency and contradiction are said to reign as much in official as in heterodox science; the man of science rejects whatever is not proven to him while the theologian accepts everything on blind faith; and the theosophist who takes nothing on trust, not even exact science, and the spiritualist who denies dogma but believes in spirits, share the same contempt from both. Two remarks are quoted for their bluntness — a prominent Irish physicist calling metaphysics a fiction like poetry, and Huxley musing that kinetic energy is an empty shadow of his mind — with Tyndall cited as admitting how powerless science is even over the world of matter. The doctrinal core follows in a series of formulations. Chaos is void to sense but latent Deity to reason, and the voidness of the seeming full is the fullness of the seeming void. There is no spatial division of above and below in occult parlance, but an eternal Within, within two other withins, as the planes of subjectivity merge into terrestrial objectivity. Light, heat and electricity are named as the gods in question. And Fohat, the light of the Logos, is described turning with his hands the seed and the curds of cosmic matter in contrary directions — the motion which differentiates primordial homogeneous matter into elements, and which is traced outward to countless other suns orbiting a central spiritual sun.

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