Isis unveiled, Volume 1 (of 2), Science

[469] “Timæus.” Such like expressions made Professor Jowett state in his Introduction that Plato taught the attraction of similar bodies to similar. But such an assertion would amount to denying the great philosopher even a rudimentary knowledge of the laws of magnetic poles.

[470] Alfred Marshall Mayer, Ph.D.: “The Earth a Great Magnet,” a lecture delivered before the Yale Scientific Club, Feb. 14, 1872.

[471] “Strange Story.”

[472] See Taylor’s “Pausanias;” MS. “Treatise on Dæmons,” by Psellus, and the “Treatise on the Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries.”

[473] Iamblichus: “De Vita Pythag.”

[474] “Anacalypsis,” vol. i., p. 807.

[475] Iamblichus: “Life of Pythagoras,” p. 297.

[476] Bulwer-Lytton: “Zanoni.”

[477] Cory: “Phædrus,” i. 328.

[478] This assertion is clearly corroborated by Plato himself, who says: “You say that, in my former discourse, I have not sufficiently explained to you the nature of the First, I purposely spoke enigmatically, that in case the tablet should have happened with any accident, either by land or sea, a person, without some previous knowledge of the subject, might not be able to understand its contents” (“Plato,” Ep. ii., p. 312; Cory: “Ancient Fragments”).

[479] “Josephus against Apion,” ii., p. 1079.

[480] See chapter ix., p.

[481] “Illusion; matter in its triple manifestation in the earthly, and the astral or fontal soul, or the body, and the Platonian dual soul, the rational and the irrational one,” see next chapter.

[482] “Perfection of Wisdom.”

[483] Porphyry gives the credit to Plotinus his master, of having been united with “God” six times during his life, and complains of having attained to it but twice, himself.

[484] Orpheus is said to have ascribed to the grand cycle 120,000 years of duration, and Cassandrus 136,000. See Censorinus: “de Natal. Die;” “Chronological and Astronomical Fragments.”

[485] W. and E. Denton; “The Soul of Things,” vol. i.

[486] See the “Cosmogony of Pherecydes.”

[487] See a few pages further on the quotation from the “Codex of the Nazarenes.”

[488] See Plato’s “Timæus.”

[489] On the authority of Irenæus, Justin Martyr, and the “Codex” itself, Dunlap shows that the Nazarenes treated their “spirit,” or rather soul, as a female and Evil Power. Irenæus, accusing the Gnostics of heresy, calls Christ and the Holy Ghost “the gnostic pair that produce the Æons” (Dunlap: “Sod, the Son of the Man,” p. 52, foot-note).

[490] Fetahil was with the Nazarenes the king of light, and the Creator; but in this instance he is the unlucky Prometheus, who fails to get hold of the Living Fire, necessary for the formation of the divine soul, as he is ignorant of the secret name (the ineffable or incommunicable name of the kabalists).

[491] The spirit of matter and concupiscence.

[492] See Franck’s “Codex Nazaræus” and Dunlap’s “Sod, the Son of the Man.”

[493] “Codex Nazaræus,” ii. 233.

[494] This Mano of the Nazarenes strangely resembles the Hindu Manu, the heavenly man of the “Rig-Vedas.”

[495] “I am the true vine and my Father is the husbandman” (John xv. 1).

[496] With the Gnostics, Christ, as well as Michael, who is identical in some respects with him, was the “Chief of the Æons.”

[497] “Codex Nazaræus,” i. 135.

[498] Ibid.

[499] “Codex Nazaræus,” iii. 61.

[500] The Astral Light, or anima mundi, is dual and bi-sexual. The male part of it is purely divine and spiritual; it is the Wisdom; while the female portion (the spiritus of the Nazarenes) is tainted, in one sense, with matter, and therefore is evil already. It is the life-principle of every living creature, and furnishes the astral soul, the fluidic perisprit to men, animals, fowls of the air, and everything living. Animals have only the germ of the highest immortal soul as a third principle. It will develop but through a series of countless evolutions; the doctrine of which evolution is contained in the kabalistic axiom: “A stone becomes a plant; a plant a beast; a beast a man; a man a spirit; and the spirit a god.”

[501] See Commentary on “Idra Suta,” by Rabbi Eleashar.

[502]Sod means a religious Mystery. Cicero mentions the sod, as constituting a portion of the Idean Mysteries. “The members of the Priest-Colleges were called Sodales,” says Dunlap, quoting Freund’s “Latin Lexicon,” iv. 448.

[503] The author of the “Sohar,” the great kabalistic work of the first century B.C.

[504] See Abbé Huc’s works.

[505] “The Sohar,” iii. 288; “Idra Suta.”

[506] Everard: “Mystères Physiologiques,” p. 132.

[507] See Plato’s “Timæus.”

[508] “Supernatural Religion; an Inquiry into the Reality of Divine Revelation,” vol. ii. London, 1875.