Isis unveiled, Volume 1 (of 2), Science

[236] “Attic.” i., xiv.

[237] Plato: “Theages.” Cicero renders this word δαιμονιον, quiddam divinum, a divine something, not anything personal.

[238] “Cratylus,” p. 79.

[239] “Arnobius,” vi., xii.

[240] As we will show in subsequent chapters, the sun was not considered by the ancients as the direct cause of the light and heat, but only as an agent of the former, through which the light passes on its way to our sphere. Thus it was always called by the Egyptians “the eye of Osiris,” who was himself the Logos, the First-begotten, or light made manifest to the world, “which is the mind and divine intellect of the Concealed.” It is only that light of which we are cognizant that is the Demiurge, the creator of our planet and everything pertaining to it; with the invisible and unknown universes disseminated through space, none of the sun-gods had anything to do. The idea is expressed very clearly in the “Books of Hermes.”

[241] “Orphic Hymn,” xii.; Hermann; Dunlap: “Musah, His Mysteries,” p. 91.

[242] Movers, 525. Dunlap: “Mysteries of Adonis,” 94.

[243] Preller: ii., 153. This is evidently the origin of the Christian dogma of Christ descending into hell and overcoming Satan.

[244] This important fact accounts admirably for the gross polytheism of the masses, and the refined, highly-philosophical conception of one God, which was taught only in sanctuaries of the “pagan” temples.

[245] Anthon: “Cabeiria.”

[246] Plato: “Phædrus,” Cary’s translation.

[247] John xx. 22.

[248] “Heathen Religion,” 104.

[249] Alkahest, a word first used by Paracelsus, to denote the menstruum or universal solvent, that is capable of reducing all things.

[250] Josephus: “Antiquities,” vol. viii., c. 2, 5.

[251] “The Land of Charity,” p. 210.

[252] The claims of certain “adepts,” which do not agree with those of the students of the purely Jewish Kabala, and show that the “secret doctrine” has originated in India, from whence it was brought to Chaldea, passing subsequently into the hands of the Hebrew “Tanaïm,” are singularly corroborated by the researches of the Christian missionaries. These pious and learned travellers have inadvertently come to our help. Dr. Caldwell, in his “Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian Languages,” p. 66, and Dr. Mateer, in the “Land of Charity,” p. 83, fully support our assertions that the “wise” King Solomon got all his kabalistic lore from India, as the above-given magical figure well shows. The former missionary is desirous to prove that very old and huge specimens of the baobab-tree, which is not, as it appears, indigenous to India, but belongs to the African soil, and “found only at several ancient sites of foreign commerce (at Travancore), may, for aught we know,” he adds, “have been introduced into India, and planted by the servants of King Solomon.” The other proof is still more conclusive. Says Dr. Mateer, in his chapter on the Natural History of Travancore: “There is a curious fact connected with the name of this bird (the peacock) which throws some light upon Scripture history. King Solomon sent his navy to Tarshish (1 Kings, x. 22), which returned once in three years, bringing ‘gold and silver, ivory and apes, and peacocks.’

Now the word used in the Hebrew Bible for peacock is ‘tukki,’ and as the Jews had, of course, no word for these fine birds till they were first imported into Judea by King Solomon, there is no doubt that ‘tukki’ is simply the old Tamil word ‘toki,’ the name of the peacock. The ape or monkey also is, in Hebrew, called ‘koph,’ the Indian word for which is ‘kaphi.’ Ivory, we have seen, is abundant in South India, and gold is widely distributed in the rivers of the western coast. Hence the ‘Tarshish’ referred to was doubtless the western coast of India, and Solomon’s ships were ancient ‘East Indiamen.’” And hence also we may add, besides “the gold and silver, and apes and peacocks,” King Solomon and his friend Hiram, of masonic renown, got their “magic” and “wisdom” from India.

[253] Cooke: “New Chemistry,” p. 22.

[254] Eliphas Levi: “Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie.”

[255] Plato hints at a ceremony used in the Mysteries, during the performance of which the neophyte was taught that men are in this life in a kind of prison, and taught how to escape from it temporarily. As usual, the too-learned translators disfigured this passage, partially because they could not understand it, and partially because they would not. See Phædo § 16, and commentaries on it by Henry More, the well-known Mystic philosopher and Platonist.

[256] The akasa is a Sanscrit word which means sky, but it also designates the imponderable and intangible life-principle—the astral and celestial lights combined together, and which two form the anima mundi, and constitute the soul and spirit of man; the celestial light forming his νοὺς, πνευμα, or divine spirit, and the other his ψυχη soul orastral spirit. The grosser particles of the latter enter into the fabrication of his outward form—the body. Akasa is the mysterious fluid termed by scholastic science, “the all-pervading ether;” it enters into all the magical operations of nature, and produces mesmeric, magnetic, and spiritual phenomena. As, in Syria, Palestine, and India, meant the sky, life, and the sun at the same time; the sun being considered by the ancient sages as the great magnetic well of our universe. The softened pronunciation of this word was Ah—says Dunlap, for “the s continually softens to h from Greece to Calcutta.” Ah is Iah, Ao, and Iao. God tells Moses that his name is “I am” (Ahiah), a reduplication of Ah or Iah. The word “As” Ah, or Iah means life, existence, and is evidently the root of the word akasa, which in Hindustan is pronounced ahasa, the life-principle, or Divine life-giving fluid or medium. It is the Hebrew ruah, and means the “wind,” the breath, the air in motion, or “moving spirit,” according to Parkhurst’s Lexicon; and is identical with the spirit of God moving on the face of the waters.

[257] Bear in mind that Kavindasami made Jacolliot swear that he would neither approach nor touch him during the time he was entranced. The least contact with matter would have paralyzed the action of the freed spirit, which, if we are permitted to use such an unpoetical comparison, would re-enter its dwelling like a frightened snail, drawing in its horns at the approach of any foreign substance. In some cases such a brusque interruption and oozing back of the spirit (sometimes it may suddenly and altogether break the delicate thread connecting it with the body) kills the entranced subject. See the several works of Baron du Potet and Puysegur on this question.

[258] “La Magie Devoilée,” p. 147.

[259] “Magie au XIXme Siècle,” p. 268.

[260] Ibid.

[261] Brierre de Boismont: “Des Hallucinations, ou Histoire raisonnée des apparitions, des songes, des visions, de l’extase du Magnetisme,” 1845, p. 301 (French edition). See also Fairfield: “Ten Years Among the Mediums.”

[262] Cabanis, seventh memoir: “De l’Influence des Maladies sur la Formation des Idées,” etc. A respected N. Y. legislator has this faculty.

[263] Irenæus: Book iii., chap. ii., sec. 8.

[264] The cow is the symbol of prolific generation and of intellectual nature. She was sacred to Isis in Egypt; to Christna, in India, and to an infinity of other gods and goddesses personifying the various productive powers of nature. The cow was held, in short, as the impersonation of the Great Mother of all beings, both of the mortals and of the gods, of physical and spiritual generation of things.

[265] In Genesis the river of Eden was parted, “and became into four heads” (Gen. ii. 5).

[266] Genesis iii. 21.

[267] This is claimed to be one of the missing books of the sacred Canon of the Jews, and is referred to in Joshua and II. Samuel. It was discovered by Sidras, an officer of Titus, during the sack of Jerusalem, and published in Venice in the seventeenth century, as alleged in its preface by the Consistory of Rabbins, but the American edition, as well as the English, is reputed by the modern Rabbis, to be a forgery of the twelfth century.

[268] See Godfrey Higgins: “Anacalypsis,” quoting Faber.

[269] See Cory’s “Ancient Fragments.” Berosus.

[270] We refer the reader for further particulars to the “Prose Edda” in Mallett’s “Northern Antiquities.”

[271] It is worthy of attention that in the Mexican “Popol-Vuh” the human race is created out of a reed, and in Hesiod out of the ash-tree, as in the Scandinavian narrative.

[272] See Kanne’s “Pantheum der Æltesten Philosophie.”

[273] “Origin of Species,” p. 484.

[274] Ibid. Which latter word we cannot accept unless that “primordial form” is conceded to be the primal concrete form that spirit assumed as the revealed Deity.