Hartmann on How to Enter the Path to Infinite Life

Franz Hartmann · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 19 pages

Nineteen pages carrying the concluding chapter on theosophy from Franz Hartmann's Magic, White and Black; or, The Science of Finite and Infinite Life, London: George Redway, 1886 — taken from the version in Tookaram Tatya's A Guide to Theosophy, Bombay, 1887, pages 377 to 400. The frontispiece is by Lady Yana Dhyana, and the epigraph is from Jakob Böhme: he who lives in life as if he were in eternity, and in eternity as if he were in life, is free. Hartmann's own life is told in a separate file in this section.

The cover title states the four terms the chapter is built on — to know the riddle of life, to want, to dare, to remain silent — which is the old occultist's formula of scire, velle, audere, tacere. The chapter opens on the problem of language, and it is here that Hartmann is most quotable. To picture the eternal and incomprehensible in forms, and to describe the unimaginable in words, is a task whose difficulty has been felt by everyone who ever attempted it; the formless cannot be described in forms, and can only be represented by allegories, which in turn can only be understood by minds open to the illumination of truth. What follows is the strongest passage in the file, and it is about consequences rather than epistemology: the misunderstanding of allegorical expressions in the sacred books has led to religious wars and to the torturing, burning and killing of thousands of innocent victims; it caused the living wives of dead Hindus to be burned with their husbands' corpses, and ignorant men and women to throw themselves before the wheels of the car of Juggernaut; and it causes the endless quarrels between some two hundred Christian sects — so that while the truth unites all humanity into one harmonious whole, the misunderstanding of it divides.

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