(Lucifer, Vol VI, 34, June 1890, pp. 265-275) Part I
By H.P. Blavatsky
".....Commence research where modern conjecture closes its faithless wings." --Bulwer-Lytton, Zanoni.
"The flat denial of yesterday has become the scientific axiom of today."
Common Sense Aphorisms.
Thousands of years ago, the Phrygian Dactyls, the initiated priests, spoken of as the "magicians and exorcists of sickness," healed diseases by magnetic processes. It was claimed that they had obtained these curative powers from the powerful breath of Cybele, the many-breasted goddess, the daughter of Coelus and Terra. Indeed, her genealogy and the myths attached to it show Cybele as the personification and type of the vital essence, whose source was located by the ancients between the Earth and the starry sky and who was regarded as the very fons vitae of all that lives and breathes. The mountain air being placed nearer to that fount fortifies health and prolongs man's existence; hence, Cybele's life as an infant is shown in her myth as having been preserved on a mountain. This was before that Magna and Bona Dea, the prolific Mater, became transformed into Ceres-Demeter, the patroness of the Eleusinian Mysteries.
Animal magnetism (now called Suggestion and Hypnotism) was the principal agent in theurgic mysteries as also in the Asclepieia -- the healing temples of Aesculapius, where the patients once admitted were treated, during the process of "incubation, "magnetically, during their sleep.
This creative and life-giving Force--denied and laughed at when named theurgic magic; accused of the last century of being principally based on superstition and fraud, whenever referred to as mesmerism--is not called Hypnotism, Charcotism, Suggestion, "psychology," and whatnot. But, whatever the expression is chosen, it will ever be a loose one if used without proper qualification. For when epitomized with all its collateral sciences--which are all sciences within the Science--it will be found to contain possibilities the nature of which has never been even dreamt of by the oldest and most learned professors of the orthodox physical Science. The latter, "authorities" so-called, are no better, indeed, than innocent bald infants when brought face to face with the mysteries of antediluvian "mesmerism." As repeatedly stated before, the blossoms of magic, whether white or black, divine or infernal, spring all from one root. The "Breath of Cybele"--Akasa-tattva in India-- is the one chief agent, and it underlays the so-called "miracles" and "supernatural" phenomena in all ages, as in every clime. As the parent root or essence is universal, so are its effects innumerable. Even the greatest adepts can hardly say where its possibilities must stop.
The Key to the very alphabet of these theurgic powers was lost after the last Gnostic had been hunted to death by the ferocious persecution of the Church; and as gradually Mysteries, Hierophants, Theophany, and Theurgy became obliterated from the minds of men until they remained in them only as a vague tradition, all this was finally forgotten. But at the period of the Renaissance, in Germany, a learned Theosophist, a Philosopher per ignem, as they called themselves, rediscovered some of the lost secrets of the Phrygian priests and of the Asclepieia. It was the great and unfortunate physician-Occultist, Paracelsus, the greatest Alchemist of the age. What genius it was who, during the Middle Ages, was the first to publicly recommend the action of the magnet in the cure of certain diseases. Theophrastus Paracelsus--the "quack" and "drunken impostor" in the opinion of the said scientific "bald infants" of his days and of their successors in ours--inaugurated, among other things in the seventeenth century, that which has become a profitable branch in trade in the nineteenth. It is he who invented and used for the cure of various muscular and nervous diseases magnetized bracelets, armlets, belts, rings, collars, and leglets; only his magnets cured far more efficaciously than do the electric belts of today. Van Helmont, the successor of Paracelsus, and Robert Fludd, the Alchemist and Rosicrucian, also applied magnets in the treatment of their patients. Mesmer in the eighteenth and the Marquis de Puysegur in the nineteenth century only followed in their footsteps.
In the large curative establishment founded by Mesmer in Vienna, he employed, besides magnetism, electricity, metals, and a variety of woods. His fundamental doctrine was that of the Alchemists. He believed that metals, as also woods and plants, have all an affinity with, and bear close relation to, the human organism. Everything in the universe has developed from one homogeneous primordial substance differentiated into incalculable species of matter, and everything is destined to return thereinto. The secret of healing, he maintained, lies in the knowledge of correspondences and affinities between kindred atoms. Find that metal, wood, stone, or plant that has the most correspondent affinity with the body of the sufferer; and, whether through internal or external use, that particular agent imparts to the patient additional strength to fight disease--(developed generally through the introduction of some foreign element into the constitution)--and to expel it, will lead invariably to his cure. Many and marvelous were such cures effected by Anton Mesmer. Subjects with heart disease were made well. A lady of high station, condemned to death, was completely restored to health by the application of certain sympathetic woods. Mesmer himself, suffering from acute rheumatism, cured it completely by using specially prepared magnets.
In 1774 he too happened to come across the theurgic secret of direct vital transmission, and so highly interested was he that he abandoned all his old methods to devote himself entirely to the new discovery. Henceforward he is mesmerized by gaze and passes, the natural magnets being abandoned. The mysterious effects of such manipulations were called by him --animal magnetism. This brought to Mesmer amass of followers and disciples. The new Force was experimented with in almost every city and town of Europe and found everywhere an actual fact.
About 1780, Mesmer settled in Paris, and soon the whole metropolis, from the Royal family down to the last hysterical bourgeoise, was at his feet. The clergy got frightened and cried--"the Devil"! The licensed "leeches" felt an ever-growing deficit in their pockets, and the aristocracy and the Court found themselves on the verge of madness from mere excitement. No use in repeating too well-known facts, but the memory of the reader may be refreshed with a few details that he may have forgotten.
It so happened that just about that time, the official Academical Science felt very proud. After centuries of mental stagnation in the realm of medicine and general ignorance, several determined steps in the direction of real knowledge had finally been made. Natural sciences had achieved a decided success, and chemistry and physics were on a fair way to progress. As the Savants of a century ago had not yet grown to that height of sublime modesty which characterizes so pre-eminently their modern successors--they felt very much puffed up with their greatness. The moment for praiseworthy humility, followed by a confession of the relative insignificance of the knowledge of the period--and even of modern knowledge for that matter of that--compared to that which the ancients knew, had not yet arrived. Those were days of naive boasting, of the peacocks of Science displaying in a body their tails and demanding universal recognition and admiration.
The Sir Oracles were not as numerous as they are now, yet their number was considerable. And indeed, had not the Dulcamaras of public fairs been just visited with ostracism? Had not the leeches well nigh disappeared to make room for diploma-ed physicians with royal licenses to kill and bury a piacere ad libitum? Hence, the nodding "Immortal" in his academic chair was regarded as the sole competent authority in the decision of questions he had never studied and for rendering verdicts about that which he had never heard of. It was the REIGN OF REASON and of Science--in its teens; the beginning of the great deadly struggle between Theology and Facts, Spirituality and Materialism. In the educated classes of Society, too much faith had been succeeded by no faith at all. The cycle of Science-worship had just set in with its pilgrimages to the Academy, the Olympus where the "Forty Immortals" are enshrined, and its raids upon everyone who refused to manifest a noisy admiration, a kind of juvenile calf's enthusiasm, at the door of the Fane of Science. When Mesmer arrived, Paris divided its allegiance between the Church, which attributed all kinds of phenomena except its own divine miracles to the Devil, and the Academy, which believed in neither God nor Devil but in its own infallible wisdom.
But there were minds which would not be satisfied with either of these beliefs. Therefore, after Mesmer had forced all of Paris into the crowd to his halls, waiting hours to obtain a place in the chair around the miraculous basquet, some people thought that it was time real truth should be found out. They laid their legitimate desires at the royal feet, and the King forthwith commanded his learned Academy to look into the matter. Then it was, that awakening from their chronic nap, the "Immortals" appointed a committee of investigation, among which was Benjamin Franklin, and chose some of the oldest, wisest, and baldest among their "infants" to watch over the Committee. This was in 1784. Everyone knows what the report of the latter and the final decision of the Academy were. The whole transaction looks now like a general rehearsal of the play, one of the acts of which was performed by the "Dialectical Society: of London and some of England's greatest Scientists some eighty years later.
Marguerite dar Boggia is the former Secretary, Membership Secretary, and Director for ISAR, the International Society for Astrological Research. She is the former Publisher of Kosmos, the ISAR journal. She is a co-founder of UAC and its past Secretary and Director. Her goal is to serve humanity and the spiritual Hierarchy of our planet. To that end, she offers FREE, online, three pages weekly of the Ageless Wisdom Teachings as was known by Pythagoras. These teachings include information that Albert Einstein received. To receive these studies, she can be contacted through her website www.FreePythagorasTeachings.com, which website she created at the age of 90. These teachings prepare us for discipleship.
References:
H.P. Blavatsky Collected Writings Vol. XII, The Theosophical Publishing House, 1980, pp 214-228
Comments